Plenty of families choose not to post
I’d guess plenty of families have decided not to post their kids’ photos on social media.
The reasons vary.
- More shows up in a photo than you’d think. Not just faces — a bag with a name on it, a school uniform or daycare hat, the view near your home. One photo can give away more than you meant it to
- Once a photo is out, it doesn’t go away. You can delete the post, but not the copies or screenshots someone else has saved
- They might mind later. The photos you post now are also photos your kids will see when they’re older
- Worry about how they’ll be used. Lately there’s the added concern that public photos could end up as AI training data
We don’t post our daughters’ photos on social media either.
That unease — about handing your kids’ photos to someone else, and about them quietly ending up as AI training data — is one of the reasons I built our365. I wrote about it in Why one photo a day.
This isn’t to say families who post are wrong. Plenty of people use social media well, with clear limits on who sees what. This piece is about how those of us who’ve decided not to post can keep a record anyway.
Stop posting, and the record tends to stop too
What often happens after you decide not to post is that the record itself stalls.
On social media, there’s an audience. Reactions come back, so you want to take another photo, keep another moment. Without your noticing, showing was part of what kept the record going.
Decide not to post, and that goes away. You still take photos, but they just pile up in your camera roll. With nothing prompting you to look back, they get buried among thousands of others.
“Not posting” quietly turns into “not keeping.” It was a decision made to protect your kids — it would be a shame if it cost you the record too.
Separate showing from keeping
It helps to split photos into two roles: photos for showing to other people, and photos for keeping for yourselves.
| Photos for showing | Photos for keeping | |
|---|---|---|
| Who sees them | Friends, acquaintances, family who live far away | Your own family |
| Where they’re stored | The service provider’s servers | Your own device and iCloud |
| What matters | Choosing who gets to see them | Keeping it going, being able to look back |
Stop posting, and the left column goes away. The right column can stay exactly as it is. Not posting and keeping a record are two separate decisions.
A way to keep them close
Photos you’re keeping don’t have to go anywhere. That’s exactly what our365 is built for.
- Your photos are stored only on your iPhone and in your own iCloud. We don’t collect them on our servers
- No ads, no tracking, no analytics SDKs. Nothing keeps track of who looked at what
- It doesn’t read your whole photo library. Only the photos you choose to add are passed to the app
Nothing gets posted, so there are no likes. Instead, you choose and keep one photo a day, and look back on them in a calendar. To keep the habit going without an audience, there are reminders and a home-screen widget to nudge you about today’s photo.
On social media, reactions were the reason to keep going. If you’re not posting, let a system do that job instead.
When you want the grandparents to see them
Deciding not to post doesn’t mean there’s no one you want to share them with. Most often, it’s grandparents who live far away.
If you want to send them everyday photos, a family photo-sharing app is a good fit. You can limit who sees them to family, which feels very different from posting publicly. I wrote about how sharing apps and our365 fit together in Apps for sharing, apps for keeping.
You can export your our365 record year by year and keep a copy yourself. Exporting is free. Sharing between partners is planned for a future version.
Deciding not to post was a choice to protect your kids. You can stand by it and still keep the record going. Start with today’s photo.
