Don’t Let a Future Break Ruin This Year’s Holiday Photos
It’s so annoying when you look through old photos and see one in which you look great or have a great time, but your ex is there for you. You cannot repost this photo as a return. Depending on how painful the breakup was, you might even feel the need to archive it so it doesn’t show up on your Instagram anymore. What a waste of memories, a good outfit, a photo shoot, whatever. (And if you’re thinking, “I’m on great terms with my ex. It’s not a problem for me,” those are the famous last words.)
Holidays are a particularly dangerous time for your future photo essay. You might think it’s harmless to take your boyfriend to a family reunion this year, and then go berserk at his presence in photos in subsequent seasons. You hope that if you break up, everything will be amicable, and the photos will leave only good memories – but why take the risk?
Don’t repeat the same mistakes this year. Approach your photos strategically so that no matter what, they remain fully usable in the future.
Ask significant other people to stand at the end of the group photos.
This tip comes from Reddit : For family gatherings this year, make sure all new important people are on the edge of your family photos so they’re easy to crop later if you need to. The focus of the photo should be the main family unit: the group of people you’re stuck with, no matter what happens in your current romantic relationship.
Don’t be too obvious about moving them to the side. Instead, try to find a way to discreetly ask an uncle or cousin to take a picture and do everything for you. It’s not that you’re planning on breaking up; you are just being pragmatic. Your partner may not appreciate it anyway, so it’s best to put the blame on a distant relative who they won’t see again until after they take a photo next year.
Ask for ‘family-only’ shots
Also, according to Reddit, you can take as many photos with your significant other as you want, but be sure to ask for a “family only” photo at some point.
“Take lots of photos with lots of combinations of people,” said one Reddit user. “The new guest doesn’t understand anything, and then you can just discard the whole photo if something changes in the future, and you won’t have to crop awkwardly or hope you’re good at Photoshop.”
Be careful when uploading to Instagram
The Instagram carousel feature, where you can attach multiple photos and videos to a single grid post, was recently updated to allow users to remove a single image from a list. This is great because it means you don’t have to destroy the entire post if you want someone who appears in the frame to be removed from your grid.
However, you may have multiple photos of the person littered in this carousel post. Always make sure that your significant other is n’t in the front photo so that if you delete the photo they’re in, it doesn’t break the continuity of the grid and make it too obvious what you’ve done. Also, make sure if your front carousel photo has them, then the second one doesn’t . You can only remove one image from the carousel, but it doesn’t matter if they are there and in the image directly behind it.
And when it comes to archiving, here’s another tip: before deleting an image that someone else is tagged in, remove that tag. Once an image is in your archive, you won’t be able to change the tags on it, but if you ever unzip it, everyone tagged will receive a new push notification that you “added a photo” with them. It’s bound to be humiliating. Remove everything you can from the carousel and remove all tags before archiving.