Family photographs have moved from albums and shoeboxes into email, social networks, family websites, and digital archives. The statistics below show how that shift developed in the United States, how parents and teenagers managed sharing, and how large institutions digitized photographs for family-history research.
Contents
- Creating and posting photographs online
- Sharing photographs across digital platforms
- Parents sharing children’s photographs
- Teen photographs and privacy controls
- Photographs, genealogy, and family connections
- Preserving and digitizing family-history photographs
Creating and posting photographs online
Online family-photo sharing became increasingly common as internet users gained easier access to cameras, phones, and upload tools. In 2013, 54% of adult U.S. internet users said they had posted original photos or videos they had created online. The comparable figure in 2012 was 46%, an increase of 8 percentage points over one year. These findings come from Pew Research Center’s “Photo and Video Sharing Grow Online” report, measured in 2013.
Photographs made up most of that original visual content. In 2013, 52% of U.S. internet users said they had posted photos they had taken themselves, while 26% said they had posted videos they had taken themselves. The measures overlap because respondents could post both formats. For family historians, this distinction matters: a personal photograph was already a more common online creation than a personal video during the period measured.
Earlier measurements show the longer transition. In 2003, 20% of U.S. internet users reported posting photographs to the web, according to Pew Research Center’s “Content Creation Online” report. By 2008, 33% of the landline-sample internet users and 37% of the cell-phone-sample internet users said they posted photos online. In the same 2008 study, 70% of landline-sample internet users and 71% of cell-phone-sample internet users said they shared digital photos through email. Those sample-specific results are from Pew Research Center’s “Part 1: Managing the ever-expanding reach of our digital footprints”.
The 2008 results also show an age difference in sharing self-created material such as photographs. Among U.S. adults ages 18–30, 42% of the cell-phone sample and 29% of the landline sample shared self-created content online. Across all adults, 29% of the cell-phone sample and 19% of the landline sample did so. These figures should not be treated as a single blended estimate because the report distinguishes the two sampling frames.
Sharing photographs across digital platforms
Posting an original family photograph is only one part of online visual activity. In 2013, 47% of adult U.S. internet users reposted photos or videos found online on image-sharing sites. More specifically, 42% reposted photos found online on sites designed for sharing images, and 36% reposted videos found online on video-sharing sites. All three measures are reported in Pew Research Center’s “Photo and Video Sharing Grow Online”.
Creating and curating often happened together. In 2013, 62% of U.S. internet users had done at least one creating-or-curating activity involving online photos or videos, and 40% had done both. This pattern describes a mixed role: many people were not only adding their own images but also collecting, reposting, or organizing images made by others.
Mobile devices were already central to this activity. In 2013, 92% of U.S. adults owned a cell phone and 58% owned a smartphone, devices used for capturing and sharing photos. Among U.S. cell-phone owners, 18% used Instagram and 9% used Snapchat, both identified in the source as photo- and video-sharing apps.
Pinterest provided another way to organize visual material. In 2012, 12% of U.S. online adults used Pinterest, where users organized and shared photos and images into themed boards. Among online women, the reported share was 19%. These figures come from Pew Research Center’s “Photos and Videos as Social Currency Online”.
| Activity or platform measure | Share | Measurement period |
|---|---|---|
| Posted original photos or videos | 54% | U.S. adult internet users, 2013 |
| Reposted photos or videos on image-sharing sites | 47% | U.S. adult internet users, 2013 |
| Did at least one creating-or-curating activity | 62% | U.S. internet users, 2013 |
| Used Instagram | 18% | U.S. cell-phone owners, 2013 |
| Used Pinterest | 12% | U.S. online adults, 2012 |
Parents sharing children’s photographs
By 2020, sharing children’s photographs, videos, or other information on social media was common among U.S. parents who used those services. Pew Research Center’s “Parents’ attitudes – and experiences – related to digital technology” found that 82% had posted such content. The study measured parents who used social media, not all parents in the United States.
There was a reported difference by parent gender. In 2020, 89% of mothers who used social media shared photos, videos, or information about their children, compared with 71% of fathers who used social media. The figures describe reported behavior during that survey period and do not establish why the difference existed.
Among parents who shared children’s content, the most common major reason was keeping friends and family informed: 76% cited sharing with friends and family. Other stated major reasons were showcasing children’s accomplishments, cited by 36%, and seeing other parents they knew share, cited by 11%.
Education was associated with different reported reasons. Among sharing parents with at least a bachelor’s degree, 83% cited sharing with friends and family as a major reason. Among sharing parents with a high-school diploma or less, the corresponding figure was 66%. The lower-education group was more likely to cite showcasing children’s accomplishments: 44%, compared with 28% of parents with college education or higher.
Not every social-media-using parent shared this kind of material. In 2020, 18% said they did not share things about their children on those sites. This non-sharing figure is useful when interpreting the 82% sharing figure: the two percentages describe the same parent population and together account for the reported split.
Teen photographs and privacy controls
Earlier research shows that photographs were also closely tied to teen profiles and privacy decisions. In 2007, 79% of U.S. teens with online profiles posted a photo of themselves to the profile, while 66% posted photos of friends. Pew Research Center reported these findings in “Online Privacy: What Teens Share and Restrict in an Online Environment”.
Among teens with online profiles, 77% said the profile was currently online. Of those with an active profile, 59% said it was visible only to friends and 40% said anyone could see it. The categories do not add to exactly 100%, so they should be read as reported response shares rather than reconstructed totals.
Photo posting varied by social-network use, age, and gender. In 2007, 73% of teens who used social networking posted photos, compared with 16% of teens who did not use social networking. Overall, 47% of wired teens said they uploaded photos online where others could see them. The reported share was 54% for teen girls and 40% for teen boys, while 58% of teens ages 15–17 posted photos compared with 36% of those ages 12–14.
Access restrictions were uneven among teens who posted photos. In 2007, 39% said they restricted access most of the time, 38% did so only sometimes, and 21% never restricted access. These findings indicate that posting and privacy control were separate behaviors: uploading a family or personal photograph did not necessarily mean applying the same visibility setting every time.
Photographs, genealogy, and family connections
Family photographs have long been connected with online genealogy and communication. In 2000, 16% of U.S. adults said they or a family member had a family web page with pictures or information about the family. The same period’s Pew Research Center “Main Report” found that 29% said they or a family member had done genealogical exploration or other research on family history.
Access and education were associated with family web pages in the reported data. Among U.S. internet users with family incomes above $75,000, 26% reported a family web page. Among college-graduate internet users, 22% reported one. These are subgroup measures from 2000, not general estimates for all adults.
Email also supported family-history work. In 2000, 25% of U.S. adults who emailed relatives said email had helped them learn more about their family. Among email users, 31% said they had used email to resume communication with a family member they had not often contacted. Also, 28% of U.S. internet users said they had used email or the web to locate a lost-contact friend or family member.
Experience online mattered in one reported comparison. Among U.S. internet users who had been online for more than a year, 34% had used email to find a relative or friend, compared with 16% of newcomers online for six months or less. In 2008, 52% of U.S. internet users living with a spouse and child said they went online with another person at least a few times a week, while 34% did so occasionally, according to Pew Research Center’s “Networked Families”.
Preserving and digitizing family-history photographs
Institutional collections illustrate the scale of the preservation task faced by anyone digitizing family photographs. The Library of Congress said its Prints and Photographs Online Catalog contained more than 1.2 million digitized images when its collection overview was published in the 2010s. Its collection overview describes the online catalog and its digitized material.
The Library of Congress also reported more than 13,000 photograph and visual-material groups containing about 1.5 million items in 2009. That measure counts items and groups in a collection context, so it is not directly interchangeable with the later catalog figure. The information appears in “Groups of Images (LOTs)”.
The Farm Security Administration collection provides a more specific example. In 2026, the Library of Congress described about 175,000 photographs from the 1930s and 1940s, with more than 160,000 digitized by that time. The same Library of Congress account reported processing of about 1,000 FSA images per month, or about 50 per working day. At that 2026 processing rate, the project produced roughly 12,000 images per year. These are estimates and a reported processing rate for that period, not a forecast of a fixed future completion date.
Demand for online photograph collections also changed over time. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog searches increased from 4.9 million in fiscal 2004 to 8 million in fiscal 2005. During fiscal 2005, the Library placed more than 55,000 master digital files online, cataloged and presented through its online catalog. These figures are reported in the Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress 2005.
For genealogy, the practical lesson is that a photograph’s value depends on both preservation and context. The historical figures above cover online family pages, email-based reconnection, catalog scale, and digitization work across different years and populations. They should be compared with their stated measurement dates and scopes rather than combined into a single trend line.