The Risks of Relying on Social Media for Photo Storage

Social media is a tool that many individuals turn to for various purposes. From hosting precious videos to fostering communication with others, it feels as if you can’t ever spend too much time on the platform!

When it comes to photos, users often upload groups of images to share them with their friends or store them for later viewing. While using social media for photo storage sounds like a convenient idea, you don’t want to rely on these platforms to safeguard your cherished memories.

Here are the risks of relying on social media for photo storage:

Affects Their Security

Data mining is a practice that includes the analysis of larger databases to create new information—regarding photos, computing processes trying to locate trends and meaningful patterns. But how does this process affect your photos?

The large collection of information acquired through data mining is attractive to hackers. With enough information acquired through images and other identifying information, these individuals can steal a person’s identity.

Changes Their Metadata

When you upload an image to a social media platform, the software strips the original metadata of your photos and generates new digital information to associate with the image. For clarification, suppose you uploaded a holiday family photo from 2019 to your social media and labeled the image as 2019-12-15_Holiday_Family_001.

While your computer retains that information in its system, an uploaded version of the same photo on social media may read differently, often including about 50 numbers and letters.

Alters Their Quality

When uploading and storing photos on social media, your images become compressed, making them much smaller. This automatic resizing causes original resolutions to deteriorate, resulting in a lower-quality photo.

If you want to download the image at a later date, you’ll realize the smaller file size and significant resolution that ruins the photo’s presentation.

Other Alternative To Consider

The risks of relying on social media for photo storage are substantial. However, they shouldn’t deter you from posting your family memories and vacations as a way to share them with others.

However, when looking for a long-term storage solution, you’ll want to partner with a digital conversion service like DiJiFi to help optimize and store photos on hard drives. That way, you can keep track of your cherished snapshots.