Facebook added a nice feature on February 4, 2014 that shows a shot video of your best moments on Facebook since you joined the social network. That video is called the look back. You can see yours here: https://www.facebook.com/lookback

I enjoyed watching mine and was wondering how could I download that video or get an URL that I could share with my closest friends and family members. I was able to solve my problem looking into Facebook’s HTML source code. However, I imagined others would want to have their lookbacks too so I decided to create an easier solution for them.

Introducing the Download Facebook Look Back bookmarklet. Follow the next steps to get an URL for your look back:

1. Drag that link to the bookmarks bar in your browser (View > Always Shows Bookmarks Bar to show the bar in Google Chrome).
2. Go to your Facebook Look Back.
3. Click the bookmarklet.
4. Your browser should be redirected to the location of your Look Back video. The bookmarklet uses the HD url so, depending on your bandwidth, it may take a a few seconds or minutes before you see the video.
5. To download your video use File > Save Page As.

If you are curious about what the bookmarklet does, here is the code:

(function() {
    containers = document.getElementsByClassName('swfObject');

    if (!containers || containers.length == 0) {
        return;
    }

    embeds = containers[0].getElementsByTagName('embed');

    if (!embeds || embeds.length == 0) {
        return;
    }

    flashvars = embeds[0].getAttribute('flashvars');
    url = decodeURIComponent(flashvars).replace(/.*?hd_src":"([^"]*)".*/, '$1');

    a = document.createElement('a');
    a.href = url.replace(new RegExp('\\/', 'g'), '/');

    document.location.href = decodeURIComponent(a.href);
})();

 

You can copy the code and paste it in Google Chrome’s Developer Tools Console or equivalent in other browsers.