Social Media is NOT Photo Storage
Repeat after me:
Social Media is not photo storage.
Social Media is NOT photo storage.
Social Media is NOT PHOTO STORAGE!
Don’t get me wrong. I love social media. I certainly spend enough time on it. And I LOVE seeing everyone’s photos of vacations and cute babies and the funny cat memes.
However, Facebook and Instagram are not photo solutions and should not be your primary photo storage location, and here’s why.
Size Matters
When you upload to Facebook, your photos are compressed. That means your pictures become much smaller and much lower quality. If you want to download a picture from Facebook, it will be a much lower quality picture, which is a big deal if you ever want to print the photo or put it in a photo book. For example,
- You take an adorable photo of your daughter opening her Christmas presents on Dec. 25, 2020. The original size is 7.6 MB
- You uploaded it to Facebook on Dec. 25, 2020.
- On February 2, 2021, you decide to download that photo for a school project. Now, the photo is 327 KB. That is a 95% reduction in size! And the file is now dated February 2, 2021, the date of the download, NOT the date the photo was taken.
Changes in Metadata
Uploading a photo to Facebook strips any metadata from your photo. Metadata is just a fancy word for all the digital information attached to your digital photo, including the date it was taken and the file name.
In the above scenario:
- The adorable photo of your daughter opening her Christmas presents was dated Dec. 25, 2020, prior to upload. It was also named 2020-12-25_Christmas_Suzie_003.
- On February 2, 2021, you decide to download that photo for a school project. Now the photo is dated Feb. 2, 2021 (the date you downloaded it) and has a really strange name that is about 50 letters and numbers long.
The file name was stripped, and the dimensions are reduced by 52%. And because it was originally posted on Instagram, it is now square.
Downloading Can Be A Pain
It is relatively easy to download all of the photos that YOU have uploaded to Facebook at once (they will still be compressed and redated). However, if you want to capture all the photos that other people have posted and tagged you in, you are in for some serious fun! NOT!
You have to download each and every one of those photos individually, which is a royal pain in the rear.
Privacy Matters
Don’t even get me started on privacy and data mining on the various sites.
In Conclusion
So, if you have been using Facebook or Instagram as a photo storage solution, please stop. If you need help figuring out an alternative, let me know. I can help.
But please do NOT stop posting cute photos and funny cat memes. We need that kind of positivity in the world today!
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This tip is right up there with “don’t store photos in a hot, dusty attic or a damp basement” and “get your photos out of those “magnetic” sticky albums”. I always feel a little sick to my stomach when I realize someone is using social media as their primary photo storage.
I was talking about this very topic with a client awhile back. I didn’t have all the specifics that you outline so clearly here, but I felt that using a social media site as your family photo album was not a good idea. I even figure it is possible that these sites could someday go away, and then so would all the photos, right?
Timely, Andi. I agree with the points both Hazel and Seana have made, relying on social media as a long-term storage solution is short-sighted. Your points about the effects of compressing photos is a wake-up call!
Not just good advice, but a treasure trove of each WHY behind the advice is exactly what people need to remind themselves not to do it. If I take a random photo that has little meaning (like, yesterday, I took a snapshot of a guy whose ENTIRE grocery cart was filled with bananas), I’m good with uploading it to Facebook and never thinking about it again, deleting it from my camera roll so I don’t have to worry about storage. But for my “real” photos, only real photo backup will do. Thanks for keeping us on our toes!
[…] Tag photos with a keyword or two to make them searchable and easily organized, such as “beach trip 2021” or “Sarah’s 3rd birthday.” Remember to back up your photos to a hard drive and/or cloud storage. Remember, posting on social media is fun, but it isn’t a backup. […]
[…] don’t recommend using social media sites as your primary storage location because most compress your files and strip any metadata from the files including the date the photo […]
[…] Social Media is NOT Photo Storage […]