How to keep your children’s photos safe online
Share children’s photos privately rather than publicly, turn off or remove location data, avoid details that identify their school or home, check who can see each post, and only upload to services that clearly explain how they store, use and delete your photos, including whether they use them to train AI.
Photos of our children are some of the most precious things on our phones, and some of the most shared. A photo shared carelessly can reveal more than you meant to, travel further than you expected and stay online long after your child would like it gone. None of this means you should stop sharing, which is part of family life, especially with relatives far away. It just pays to do it thoughtfully.
Why it’s worth taking care
Anything other people can see can be screenshotted, saved and reshared, and once that happens you lose control of where it goes. Photos can also carry information you can’t see: many phones store the location where a photo was taken inside the image file. Backgrounds give things away too. A school uniform, a house number, a street sign or a car number plate can reveal where a child lives or goes to school.
Then there is time. A photo that seems sweet now may embarrass a teenager later, and many children have firm views about what gets shared once they are old enough to have them. The services themselves change as well: apps and websites change their terms, get sold or suffer data breaches.
Before you share: three quick checks
1. Location data
Phone cameras can record GPS location in every photo. Some apps strip it out when you post, but not all do, and photos sent as files or uploaded to websites may keep it.
If you don’t need location tagging, turn it off in your camera settings; on most phones it is under camera or privacy settings. Many phones also let you remove the location from an individual photo as you share it. And avoid tagging places like your home, school or nursery in posts.
2. Identifying details in the picture
Look at the background as well as the child. School or nursery logos, names on uniforms or book bags, your house number, street name or car number plate, name labels on coats, and letters, forms or screens with personal details on them can all identify where a child lives or learns. Crop them out, or choose another photo.
3. Names and dates
A child’s full name together with their date of birth, school or town is exactly the kind of information that shouldn’t sit together in public. Use first names or nicknames, and avoid posting birth dates alongside photos.
On social media
Start with your audience. Know whether each post is public, visible to friends, or to friends of friends, and make private the default. Smaller groups, such as close friends lists, private family groups or shared albums, let you share with grandparents without sharing with everyone. Most platforms also let you change who can see your old posts in bulk, which is worth doing once.
Skip public hashtags on photos of your children. Let friends and family know you’d rather they didn’t post photos of your children publicly without checking first, and do the same for theirs. And avoid posting photos of children in the bath, in swimwear or partly dressed, however innocent they are.
Charities such as the NSPCC publish online safety advice for parents that is worth reading alongside your platform’s privacy help pages.
Family group chats and shared albums
Private chats and shared cloud albums are a good way to share with family, but check them from time to time. Who is in the group now, and has anyone left or been added? Does the album have a share link that anyone with the link can open? And do photos save automatically to other people’s phones and back-ups? Once a photo is on someone else’s device, it is out of your control.
Before uploading to any photo service
Printing services, photo books, AI tools and apps all need you to upload photos. Before you do, look for clear answers to these questions, ideally in plain English rather than buried in legal terms:
- What is the photo used for: only making your order, or also marketing, research or improving the product?
- Is it used to train AI? Look for a direct statement either way.
- Who can see it? Is it ever public, do people check it, and is that access controlled?
- Is it stored encrypted, and where?
- Which other companies, such as printers, AI providers or hosting firms, receive it?
- How long is it kept? Look for a specific period, not “as long as necessary”.
- Can you delete it, and does deletion include back-ups?
- Is location data removed?
- Could your child appear in the company’s advertising? That should only ever happen with your separate, explicit agreement.
In the UK, data protection law (UK GDPR) gives you the right to ask a company what data it holds about you and, in many cases, to have it deleted. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is the UK regulator if you have a complaint.
Asking permission, and respecting children’s views
Ask other parents before you share a photo of their child, or use it in something like a photo book. As your own children get older, ask them too: it shows respect, and it teaches them to think about consent and privacy for themselves. With grandparents and other relatives, it helps to agree some family “rules” together, so everyone knows what is fine to share and where.
How we handle photos at Colour Your Family
A family colouring book will very often include children, so we treat every photo as a photo of a child. Location details are removed as soon as a photo is uploaded. Photos are stored encrypted, never made public, and used for one thing only: making your book. No AI training, no face recognition, and your book never appears in our marketing.
As few people as possible see your photos. An automated check looks for anything unsuitable, then one of our team checks every page before printing. Everything is deleted on a fixed timetable: original photos 14 days after dispatch and unpaid drafts after 30 days, and you can delete your photos sooner from your order page.
Our privacy policy lists every company that handles your photos and the full retention timetable. If you’re making a book for a child, our page on personalised colouring books for kids covers safety from the staples to the photos.
A quick checklist
- Location tagging off, or removed before sharing
- Nothing in the background that identifies home or school
- No full name alongside a birthday or school
- A private audience by default
- No bath or swimwear photos
- The family agrees what is fine to share
- Photo services answer the key questions: what it’s used for, whether it trains AI, how long it’s kept and how to delete it
