Why you shouldn’t use social media as your photo library and what you should do instead

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Do you use social media to share your photos and videos with friends? Do you share your best and favorite photos? Do you rely on social media sites to house your photo library, assuming if needed you could always download from them later?

I get it. Facebook and Instagram make it easy and fun to share your photos. Family and friends can see what you are up to, you can have a conversation, you can create albums for events, and they are free! So what’s the problem?

The problems are many:

Photos are compressed upon upload

All photos shared on social media are compressed upon upload.This means they lose quality the minute you put them up there. And why wouldn’t they be? Think about how much data these sites are storing for their members. It doesn’t make sense for them to hold your originals. Back in the mid-2000s when social media began, photos were 1-2MB. Today my phone takes photos that are generally 3.4MB but has the capacity to shoot up to 75MB photos on the Pro Raw setting. The DSLR I use when digitizing client prints shoots at 50MB. Therefore it makes sense that any platform that is storing your photos for free will compress them to decrease their storage costs. What does that mean for you? It means that photos you take out of social media cannot be printed to the same size as a photo that went in, and will likely look pixelated on a big screen.

At left the head is blurry. Imagine this is your favorite photo of your baby? Wouldn’t you prefer to keep the sharper version?

Metadata is stripped from your photos

The moment you upload your media to your social account, you lose the date it was taken, the place, and most other information about that photo. Why does this matter? If you download your photos from social media and put them back into your photo library, in any platform, they will all likely sort to the date you downloaded them. Over time you could have uploaded hundreds or thousands of photos in social media, and now they will all show up in your photo library as, say, May 1, 2025. Not helpful for searching or for documenting the photographic history of your life.

This is actually not a bad thing as far as social media is concerned - if someone takes and uses your photo without your permission at least it might have a bit less personal information. But it’s not helpful for you in terms of backing up your photos.

The platforms are free

Wait, this is a bad thing? Yes, and this is why. You are relying on the good will of the company to keep your media safe and secure but you are not paying them to do it. That literally makes no sense and you must ask yourself what do they get out of this deal? What are you giving them that is more valuable than money?

You are giving them you. For advertising, for research, and allowing their partners to use your photos if you don’t stay on top of your privacy settings.

What if they change their policies? What recourse do you have if they lose your data? Pretty much none.

This also leads me to…

Privacy concerns

And then there are the privacy concerns. I have posted before about photo privacy and the dangers of sharing certain types of media online. You can read that post here. But that is mostly talking about what bad actors might do with your photos and videos, and the information that is embedded in these photos. But there is more to it than that.

Did you ever wonder what social media gets in return for hosting your media for free? They get a license to use your media. This does not mean that they own your photos and videos, you retain ownership, but you are allowing them and their partners to use your media for as long as it exists in the platform and potentially longer. Here are the terms you are bound by when you use Facebook:

“Permission to use content you create and share: Specifically, when you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights on or in connection with our Products, you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). This means, for example, that if you share a photo on Facebook, you give us permission to store, copy, and share it with others (again, consistent with your settings) such as Meta Products or service providers that support those products and services. This license will end when your content is deleted from our systems.” https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms (emphasis added).

This license ends when you delete your media from the platform. Except when it doesn’t. Check out this exception to the deleted content rule on Facebook:

“Content will not be deleted within 90 days of the account deletion or content deletion process beginning in the following situations: where your content has been used by others in accordance with this license and they have not deleted it (in which case this license will continue to apply until that content is deleted)”. https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms (emphasis added).

Let’s say that you are fine with the above restrictions, as many people are. You should still not use social media as your photo storage platform. You can now download your media out of social media without too much trouble, but it will not be organized in any way that makes sense, and remember, it is all compressed and missing the metadata that tells you the when and where.

I am not telling you not to use social media

A photo library should be accessible, searchable, and secure. Social media only satisfies accessible and a bit of searchable. It is certainly not secure as it can be deleted at any time, and does not keep the original copies of your media and all its metadata safe.

But it does have its place for many people. It allows for sharing and conversation, storytelling, and who doesn’t love the on this day memories?

I do love the on this day memories, and those donuts were delishious!

I use it for certain things too - I use it for my business and I use it personally to share exciting or silly things happening in my life. In the spring this is usually birds, which no one really cares about but me, but I share them anyway. At this time of year my friends feeds are filled with where their seniors are going to college, which allows us to share in their pride and excitement for their kids. So setting the privacy concerns aside for now, social media should be used to, well, be social. Social media should not be used to secure your photos and videos for the future.

What should you do instead?

There are many good options for photo storage, and you are probably already using at least one of these. I have several posts on photo storage platforms including this one that talks generally about several options, this one on Mylio Photos, and this one on FOREVER. It is just a fact of life now that you need to pay for photo storage in one way or another, whether that be cloud storage or external drives. Think about how you would feel if you lost your entire collection - isn’t it worth it to pay for an appropriate amount of storage?

I work with clients all the time who really don’t want to pay for more than 200GB, and they come to me because their phone storage is full, or their cloud storage is full and they are anxious about losing their photos. My advice is the same every time - pay for more storage. If you don’t, and you lose your phone, you will lose any media that was not backed up to the cloud and there is no way to get it back. You may not even realize that your media is not backed up.

Don’t want to use the cloud? Consider Mylio Photos, which can back up your photos without the cloud. Or you can export your photos on a regular basis to an external hard drive. But if you forget, or don’t do it regularly, you risk losing precious media.

But but but how will I find my favorites?

As many people only share their favorite photos on social media, it is a natural culling system. Here’s an idea: whenever you share something to social media, favorite that item in the photo storage platform you are using. At the very least favorite them in your camera roll. Or create a digital album for these photos and videos. If you are posting them, they must have some special meaning for you and it will allow you to find them again later. This takes but a second.

Better yet, favorite them as you take them. Then when you get ready to post them to social media, you can find them quickly. Even just this tiny step will go a long way towards getting your media organized.

Bottom line? Social media should be used to be social. But utilize a real photo storage platform to keep your memories safe.