Facebook used to only let you set a single privacy setting for all your old profile photos, but now there’s a privacy widget on every past profile photo. This puts your Profile Photos album in a special category alongside Mobile Uploads that Facebook tells me “gives people more granular control” over photos you upload one at a time. More controls may translate into more willingness to upload photos.

Your current profile photo and cover photo are still public, though, so you might want to keep the beer and cleavage out of those.

All your other albums beyond Profile Photos and Mobile Uploads will only have a cross-album privacy setting that applies to every photo inside. The “Edit Album Privacy” button seen below was how the Profile Photos album previously functioned as well.

To make sure people undersand their newfound control, Facebook will be doing some education in the form of sidebar ads explaining the change and leading to the Help Center

It’s a big day for Facebook photo privacy, considering this morning it confirmed with Ars Technicathat after years of criticism from privacy groups and blog, its new server system completely erases photos users click the “delete” button on.

With these new controls, users may be more willing to share shots of themselves because they know they’ll always be able to control their visibility individually, and they can nuke them if need be.