Is It Safe to Use Photos of Your Child for Personalized Products Online? What Parents Should Know
Last month, I was curled up on the couch at 9:17 pm, one eye on my partner folding soccer socks and the other scrolling a custom print website. I was 20 minutes away from the deadline to order personalized water bottle labels for my older daughter’s 10U soccer team, and I’d just pulled up the group photo I’d snapped after their final scrimmage. My 10-year-old Lila wandered in to grab a granola bar from the coffee table, glanced at my screen, and stopped mid-reach. “Mom,” she said, “why are you putting my picture on the internet?”
I brushed her off at first, explaining it was just for the labels, the company printed it and shipped it, no one but the team would see it. She leaned against the couch arm and said, “But the company has it, right? What do they do with it after?” That’s when I remembered: six months earlier, she’d come home from school upset because a class mom had posted a public fall festival photo to Instagram where Lila’s bangs were sticking up after recess, and a kid from another class had screenshotted it and showed it around the playground teasing her. She’d been really careful about who sees what photos of her ever since, and I’d totally forgotten that when I decided to use that group shot.
I set the phone down and started looking through the website’s fine print while Lila ate her granola. I’d uploaded photos of my kids to these sites a dozen times before—custom Christmas ornaments, camp name tags, birthday invitations, a puzzle for my mom with a photo of both kids last Mother’s Day—and I’d never once checked what happens to the photos after I hit upload. Turns out, this site’s terms said they can “retain user content for promotional purposes” unless you opt out, and the opt out form was buried three pages deep in the help center. I closed the tab, opened another one I’d used before that I remembered had a clearer policy, and pulled up all the other photos I had from the scrimmage to show Lila.
This whole interaction got me thinking a lot about how we treat our kids’ photos as just a thing we have, instead of something that belongs to them. It’s easy to see a cute photo and think “that would make a great custom mug for grandma” or “perfect for team favors” and not stop to think about two big things: what the company might do with the photo, and what your kid thinks about it.
A cousin of mine found her 2-year-old’s photo in a Facebook ad for baby onesies a couple years back. She’d ordered one custom onesie with his photo for his grandma from a small online shop, and they’d pulled the photo from her upload to use in their marketing. She never gave them permission, and it took her three weeks of sending emails to get it taken down. That’s the privacy risk part—even small, seemingly reputable sites can and do use uploaded photos for their own purposes if their terms allow it, and a lot of parents never check that fine print.
But the bigger thing I hadn’t thought about much is what this means for my kid’s sense of autonomy. Kids start developing a sense of their own public image way earlier than a lot of us expect. By 8 or 9, they’re already figuring out what parts of themselves they want to share with other people, and what feels embarrassing or too personal. When I just upload a photo of Lila without asking her, I’m telling her that my call about her image matters more than hers. That’s not a lesson I want to teach her, especially when she’s going to start making her own choices about what to share online in just a couple years.
I’ve changed a few small habits since that night on the couch, and none of them take more than a couple minutes. First, I always show the kid the photo I want to use before I do anything, and ask them directly if they’re okay with that photo being uploaded and printed. If it’s for a group order, I shoot a quick text to all the parents 24 hours ahead of time saying I’m using a group photo for the order, and ask anyone who’d prefer their kid be left out to let me know. If someone says yes, I just crop them out or pick a different photo. It takes 2 minutes to send the text, and no one’s ever minded.
Second, I do a 30-second check of the website’s privacy policy before I upload anything. I just open the privacy page, hit search and look for “uploaded photos” or “user content”. If the policy says they can use your content for any purpose, or they don’t say when they delete photos after the order is done, I close the tab and go somewhere else. Local print shops almost always let you bring a photo in person or delete it right after printing, so that’s an easy backup if I can’t find an online site I trust.
Third, if I do use an online site, I make sure to send a quick email after my order ships requesting that they delete all my photos. Most sites will do this if you ask, even if it’s not their default policy.
I’m not saying you should never order personalized products with your kid’s photo. We still got our custom water bottles, they turned out great, the kids loved them. It’s not about never using your kid’s photo, it’s about being intentional about it. My 8-year-old son doesn’t care what photo we use, he’ll usually pick the silliest one he can find and think it’s the best thing ever, so that’s fine. But Lila cares, and that matters.
Last week, I was scrolling through a site looking at custom Christmas ornaments, and Lila came over to see what I was doing. I showed her the two photos I was thinking of using—one of her in the neon reindeer sweater my aunt got her last year, and one of her sitting with our golden retriever by the Christmas tree. She pointed straight to the one with the dog and said “definitely that one. The sweater is cringey.” That’s exactly the point, right? It’s her face, her call.
I still mess it up sometimes—last week I almost uploaded a photo of my son to a custom mug site without asking, I just caught myself. We don’t have this all figured out, and there’s still a chance a site I trust will change their policy down the line and hang onto my kids’ photos anyway. But these small steps don’t cost anything, and they mean I get to respect my kids’ boundaries while still getting the cute keepsakes I want. That’s good enough for me right now.
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