I’ve fairly recently entered into a new relationship after my last one ended about a year before. When I broke up with my last girlfriend Facebook became a bit of a painful experience for me, seeing everyone having such a great time when I was feeling down in the dumps but more so because Facebook had a plethora of photos of me and my ex-girlfriend on at various events we’d been to over the years together.
As they were painful to ok through I didn’t go thru and remove all of them, I just ended up stopping looking at them. In time it was no longer painful and I moved on but I didn’t bother going back thru all my photos to delete

Now I’ve entered a new relationship and, of course, my new girlfriend isn’t too happy about seeing photos of me and my ex on Facebook. As such I’m faced with the labourious task of taking all the photos down or changing the permissions so that my girlfriend can’t see them.
As more than just my ex and I are in these albums and the others in those albums might like the photos of them and want to keep them online still, changing the permissions seems like a logical option. Note, that’s man logic, girlfriend logic would probably dictate that I’m keeping them online so I can look through them whenever I want. I’m going to work with man logic for this post.

So if you want to prevent your new girlfriend from seeing photos of you and your ex by exclusion then you’d need to go through each album the very instant you add your girlfriend on Facebook and add her as someone who can’t see this album.
Far better than when you start dating a new girlfriend you put her and friends who are likely to be in the albums with you, into one Facebook friend list, then only allow access to that group.
That way if you need someone to see those photos you have to add them to that group, rather then have to hide it from whomever you need to.

As such it seems like putting your friends, and girlfriends into little boxes is the best way to ensure that people don’t see what they don’t want to see.