Collecting photos for childhood photo games without a consent mistake

The baby-photo game reliably makes a room laugh, and it can go wrong in a way no apology fixes. The pictures are of children.

Some of those children are now in the room. Some are famous. Some are neither, and those should not be on your sheet at all.

This guide to childhood photo games is organized as the questions hosts actually ask, in the order they usually ask them, with the plain answer to each.

What to take away

Which version am I running?

Decide this first, because everything else follows from it.

The room version. Each player supplies a photo of themselves as a child. The room guesses who is who. The subjects are present, they chose the image, and the reveal is the fun.

The public-figure version. The sheet carries early photos of people the room knows from their public work. Nobody in the picture is present, the identification is your claim, and the sourcing is the work.

Mixing them is a mistake for one reason. The rules that make the room version safe, chiefly that the subject is present and consenting, do not exist in the public-figure version.

The rules that make the public-figure version defensible, chiefly a documented origin for each image, do not exist for a photo someone pulled off their own phone. Run one or the other in a given round.

How do I collect photos from players without it going wrong?

Ask early, ask individually and let each person choose. A workable set of rules to send with the request:

Send these rules with the request:

That last rule is the one to actually keep. A deck of colleagues' childhood photos on a shared drive is a small liability that nobody intended to create, and deleting it takes a minute.

Be aware that opting out is not always as easy as you have made it sound. People have childhoods they do not want to display, and the cheerful group email can make declining feel conspicuous. Make the invitation genuinely optional, and if one person declines, say nothing about it to the room.

Why does consent matter for a photo the person already has?

Because informed consent is specific to a use. Agreeing a photo exists, or that a parent could keep it, or that it could sit in an album, is not agreeing it can be projected in front of forty people with a score attached.

For this game, treat the person in the frame as the one who decides whether their photo is included. That is the host's consent rule, not a claim that the person pictured owns the photo or controls every use under law.

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission enforces the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule), which implements the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). It concerns covered online services collecting personal information from children under 13; it is not a blanket permission rule for an adult's party game. Copyright is separate: under the Copyright Act of 1976, the photographer or another rights holder generally controls the photo's copyright, while state right-of-publicity laws vary and may apply to commercial uses of a person's identity. These rules do not replace asking the pictured adult for permission to include their photo.

In the room version this is straightforward: the subject is an adult, present, and hands you the image. In the public-figure version it is the reason for the sourcing rule below, since the subject cannot be asked and somebody else's caption is not their consent.

Where can images for the public-figure version come from?

From places that describe what they hold and on what terms. Three kinds of source are workable:

For named starting points, check the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online, the National Archives Catalog, and Wikimedia Commons. Their holdings are not the same, and a catalog entry or file page is not automatically permission to reuse an image. Getty Images and AP Images are commercial licensing sources; request terms for the specific image and intended use, such as projection, printing, or online posting. Fees and permitted uses vary by image and license, so confirm them before using the file.

An image that arrives with a confident caption and no origin is not usable, however plausible it looks. In this format you are the one asserting who the child is, and if the assertion is wrong there is nobody in the room who can correct you.

Two exclusions are absolute: do not use images plainly private when made and surfaced by someone else, such as school photos, family albums, or images posted by relatives.

Do not use any image of a child who is not a public figure, including a famous person's children. A public life is not inherited by those born into it.

What checks does a file need before it goes on a sheet?

Beyond confirming who it shows, look at the file itself. Image files can carry embedded Exif data: a capture date, a device, sometimes a location. Two consequences follow.

For the room version, strip that data before the images are shown or shared. It can carry a location the player did not mean to hand over.

For the public-figure version, the data sometimes shows the file was re-saved through several platforms. It is far from an original, so keep looking for one.

How should the round be scored?

Lightly. A childhood photo is weak evidence, and the point of the round is the reveal, not the ranking. Give a point per correct match, keep the round short, and do not let it decide the night. A format that is mostly laughter should not carry the weight of a tie-break.

Show the adult only as the reveal. Putting the two images side by side turns the question into a matching task, which is easier and much less fun.

Where this connects

The general checks for any picture on a sheet, from reproduction to numbering, are set out under photo quizzes, and they apply here on top of everything above. A childhood image is often a fair prompt for a question about somebody's later work, which belongs to the career quizzes way of thinking rather than to the face.

Questions where recognition of a person is the whole task follow the rules in guess the celebrity. For a round where the personal object is a signed item rather than a photograph, the sourcing standard in celebrity signatures is the same idea applied to ink.

Common questions

A player sent a photo with their sibling in it. Can I crop it?

Crop it, and tell them you did. If cropping leaves nothing usable, ask for another photo rather than using the sibling.

Somebody in the room recognizes a child in a public-figure image as someone else. What now?

Accept their answer for the night and check the record afterwards. Misattributed childhood photos are common, and a room that knows better than your sheet is the reason to source carefully in the first place.

Can I keep the deck for next year?

The public-figure deck, yes, with a yearly re-check of every source. The room deck, no. Delete it and ask again next time.

Is it fine to post the round on social media afterwards?

Not the room version, ever, and not the public-figure version unless every image came with a stated reuse position that covers posting.

What if a player's childhood photo turns out to be of somebody else entirely?

Then they have played a better game than you were running, and the round survives. That is the joy of the room version: the subject is there to answer for the picture.