Posting Kids Photos Online

There’s a lot of debate about whether or not you should post your child’s pictures online. Before the days of Facebook and other social media sites, this wasn’t really a conversation at all. There wasn’t really any reason to post a picture of your child online. These days, there are hundreds of different sites where you can post your child’s pictures online, and all of them want you to do it as much as you’re able.

Having pictures that you can share with your family is actually really convenient. It used to be a real chore to get pictures to your family - you’d have to print a picture and send it in the mail. Or else you’d have to visit them and bring your pictures with you. It’s pretty incredible how easy it is to share a picture with those that are many hours away all with the click of a button - technology is pretty incredible.

Of course, the downside to the ease of sharing photos online is that you are now sharing photos with more than just your own family. It’s really easy to share a photo on social media, but it’s harder to control who has access to those photos. Do you know who actually can see the pictures you’re posting online? Unlikely as most social media sites don’t provide the information to you about who is seeing your posts.

While there is a slim chance that your child’s photo can end up in the wrong hands, it’s unlikely that they will. You should never be posting embarrassing photos of your child on social media regardless of whether or not you choose to post their pictures. As long as you’re keeping your photos appropriate, then there’s not really any reason that your child’s safety should be at risk because of a basic picture.

However, there are reasons that it’s a bad idea to post your child’s pictures online. First off, your child likely hasn’t given any type of permission to have their picture posted online. Even if they do, it’s unlikely that they understand the consequences that may result in the future because of it. You simply never know when a photo of your child will come back to embarrass them or hurt them in the future.

Similarly, technology is quite advanced these days. Many sites are grabbing photos, scanning them, pulling out information such as location, and building a profile of your child (and all people for that matter). It sounds crazy, but it’s the case. Every time you post a picture online, computers are tirelessly working to build out a little bit more information about your child from that photo. There’s likely a pretty advanced profile of your child online already.

Finally, many pictures have location data embedded in them. This is where safety can potentially become an issue when providing photos of your child online. If someone wants to find where you are, it’s quite simply to take a picture and look up the data about where it was taken and when. While many sites strip that data out of the photos, not all of them do. If you don’t know how to strip that data yourself, you shouldn’t be posting the picture in the first place.

Sharing photos of your child is great. Unfortunately, it’s a bad idea to share those photos freely on social media. If you’d like to share pictures with your family, use email or other more secure methods to share the pictures.