When was the last time you held an actual photo album or actual prints of photographs in your hands? Maybe you look back at older photographs only when Facebook reminds you of a pic from a few years back. If so, you may be risking your visual history.

Facebook is a great way to share photos with friends and family around the world. You get to enjoy their likes and interact with others via the comments section. But using Facebook as storage medium for your photos is not a good idea and this article will detail why.

Some people treat Facebook as their photo album archive. They delete the originals from their devices or digital camera when they need more space. Facebook though, compresses images for faster download. If, in the future,  you would like to print those photos, they would not look as good as the originals as the resolution has degraded.

That is not the only drawback. When you trust Facebook with all your photos, you are letting a company control your photo archive. It may to hard to imagine, given Facebook’s size, but what happens to your photos if the company goes bust? We don’t know. Those who were keeping their photos on Myspace in 2006 might have an idea.

The younger crowd is already moving onto other social platforms. Also, Facebook’s growth rate in North America and Europe is slowing. Those daily active users are the primary source of their revenue.

Even if Facebook continues as the business behemoth it is today, we do not know what policy changes it might make. It can change its terms of service whenever it wants (if you even read it in the first place) and users have no guarantee on how long Facebook will store their images or content.

Keep in mind that many of the photos showing up in your timeline are actually taken by others who have tagged you in. Facebook provides an entire album of other people’s photos when they’ve tagged you, but if they decided to untag you or remove the photo, that photo would be gone.

There is also the risk of your account getting shut down, hacked or corrupted. You, or your friends may have had their accounts hacked in the past and you wouldn’t want a thief to steal or delete all your photo.

Our Recommendation

Just as with data, we recommend you have a “3-2-1” backup system for your digital photographs. This means having three copies of the photos you care about on 3 different medium.

You might keep one copy on the original device, but you’d have two other copies of the high-quality, original image on say an external hard drive an also backed up to the cloud.

The cloud backup gives you access to the photos from any device in any location. So if the worst happens and you data is lost or corrupted due to a hardware failure, flood, fire or theft, you still have a backup.

Just use your Facebook photos and videos to be shared with friends and family.

We can help if you are unsure how to safely store your photos and videos? Our experts may even become new Facebook friends (we can then like each other’s photos with the peace of mind that the original photos aren’t going anywhere!).