# Practical Analyses of How Common Social Media Platforms and Photo Storage Services Handle Uploaded Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12133 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12133/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [TextRich: A Multi-Domain Benchmark for Detecting AI-Generated Text-Rich Images from GPT-Image-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19259/) (2026)
- [An Innovative Tool for Uploading/Scraping Large Image Datasets on Social Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09237/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The research done in this study has delved deeply into the changes made to digital images that are uploaded to three of the major social media platforms and image storage services in today's society: Facebook, Flickr, and Google Photos. In addition to providing up-to-date data on an ever-changing landscape of different social media networks' digital fingerprints, a deep analysis of the social networks' filename conventions has resulted in two new approaches in (i) estimating the true upload date of Flickr photos, regardless of whether the dates have been changed by the user or not, and regardless of whether the image is available to the public or has been deleted from the platform; (ii) revealing the photo ID of a photo uploaded to Facebook based solely on the file name of the photo.