Posting Fewer Photos of My Kids' Faces

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I share photos of my kids online.

Not whether I should share anything at all. I’m not there, and honestly, I don’t know that I ever will be. I like sharing little pieces of our life. Family trips, ball games, birthdays, random Saturday adventures, the normal stuff that makes up a life. I also like having a blog that feels like it belongs to an actual person with an actual family, not a sanitized content machine.

But I have decided to change the way I share those photos.

The short version is this: I want to post fewer clear, straight-on photos of my kids’ faces. When I do share family photos, I want to lean more toward shots from behind, odd angles, distant photos, cropped photos, or pictures where their faces are covered in some obvious way.

Kids and Kalena looking out from the back of a truck — This is my favorite version of the idea: still personal, no editing required.

This is one of those decisions that feels obvious once you say it out loud, but it took me a while to actually settle on it. I don’t think I’ve been reckless. I don’t post every detail of their lives. I don’t share school names or locations in real time. I don’t treat my kids like a content strategy.

Still, the internet feels more permanent than it used to. Or maybe I’m just more aware of how permanent it always was.

A photo posted today can end up indexed, copied, saved, scraped, screenshotted, and fed into who knows what. That sounds dramatic, but it also sounds like Tuesday. Even if the original post disappears later, there is no real promise that the photo disappeared with it.

And my kids are still kids. They can say, “sure, that’s fine,” but that doesn’t mean they understand what it means to have a searchable archive of their childhood available to strangers, future classmates, future employers, or whatever strange version of the internet exists by the time they’re grown.

To be fair, none of us fully understands that. I certainly didn’t when I started putting pieces of my life online years ago. The difference is that I made those choices for myself. I don’t want to saddle them with choices I made for them just because I thought a photo was cute in 2026.

So I’m trying to play it safe.

My current approach is pretty simple:

If the photo works without their faces, use that one.
If the angle already hides enough, leave it alone.
If the photo really needs to be shared, cover the face.
If covering the face makes the photo weird or pointless, don’t post it.

That last one is the trickiest. Some photos only work because of the expression. The missing tooth smile. The proud look after doing something hard. The pure chaos of a kid being a kid. Cover the face and the whole thing falls flat.

In those cases, I’m trying to be more willing to keep the photo for us and not post it. Not every good memory needs an audience. I know that sounds like something you’d find printed on a decorative sign at a store that smells like candles, but it’s true.

Kalena and our daughter at a restaurant with a smiley face covering our daughter’s face — Sometimes the photo still works because the moment is bigger than the face.

Family photo outside with smiley faces over the kids — The smiley faces are not subtle, but subtle is not really the goal.

For a while, I used MaskerAid by Casey Liss on my iPhone for this, and it works well for quick emoji covers. But the more I did it, the more I wanted something that fit my exact little workflow: open one photo, cover faces, strip metadata, export a clean copy, move on.

So I made FaceMask, a small Mac app for exactly that. It is not the point of this post, but it came out of this decision. I wanted the safer version of a photo to be easy enough that I would actually choose it.

Family photo outside a pizza restaurant with smiley faces over the kids — This kind of edit takes a few seconds, which means I might actually keep doing it.

FaceMask is deliberately boring in the best way. One photo at a time. No library. No account. No cloud upload. It covers faces with emoji, lets me adjust anything it misses, strips the metadata I do not want to share, and exports a new copy. The original stays untouched.

FaceMask editing a family photo on macOS — The little tool I made because I wanted this habit to be easier.

That is really the whole point for me. I don’t want this to become another complicated system. I just want a better default.

I still want to write about my family. I still want to share the occasional photo. I still want this site to feel personal. But I also want my kids to inherit as little unnecessary internet baggage from me as possible.

That seems like a reasonable trade.