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Can I Delete An Image From A Post On Social Media?

Sometimes you make a post on social media and you either have second thoughts about the photos you chose to go with your post, or you realise that it might not be appropriate to keep up there for one of myriad reasons. So can you alter or delete an image from a post on social media after you have posted it?

It’s happened to us all, for both legitimate reasons, or because you messed up. For example, there might be a picture that shows someone in the background who doesn’t want to appear in your feed so they’ve requested removal, there might be an issue with a technicality depicted in one of your images that doesn’t show the product in its best light, the copyright of an image might be under question, someone has complained about an image on your timeline… we could go on… Whatever the reason, you will need to know what to do to rectify the situation.

So what do you do if you want to amend the images on a post?

TLDR: on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram you need to delete the whole post and start again. On Facebook, you have options.

 

How to make amends on a published Instagram post

The things you can change on an already published Instagram post are the text, the tags, the location and the copy text of the post. In fact almost all aspects of an Instagram post can be edited apart from the images (apart from being able to go back and add people or products as tags on images).

To make an edit to everything apart from the images, navigate to the post and click the three dots at the top right corner of the post and select ‘edit’.

Conclusion: To change an image on Instagram, you have to delete or archive the whole post and start again.

 

How to make amends on a published LinkedIn post

On LinkedIn, you can add a caption to an image after it has been published but you can’t edit the image itself. You can edit the copy of the text to correct typos and you can also edit the tagging on your post as well – which you need to do on the live platform anyway if you are looking to tag a person and not a company. As a side note, LinkedIn only allows you to tag company pages via third party tools like Hootsuite.  So if it’s a person you need to tag, you need to add a notification on your phone to login and edit the post once it’s gone live and tag them in.

To make an edit to a LinkedIn post, navigate to the post and click the three dots at the top right corner of the post and select ‘edit update’.

Conclusion: To change an image on LinkedIn, you have to delete the whole post and start again.

 

How to make amends on a published Twitter post

Twitter is pretty hardcore and they don’t allow you to edit any aspect of your posts after you have published them. Twitter have been asked many times by users to allow the editing of posts to enable them to correct a typo that you *always see* right after you hit the publish button. Twitter have stood firm that they won’t allow this though.

Given the number of Twitter spats that break out on this platform between rival groups this is probably the reasoning for Twitter not allowing people to edit their posts. It’s all too easy in an ongoing argument on social media for someone to edit their original post to reframe what they originally said, which is all a bit Big Brother (the George Orwell type and not the scantily clad celeb-wannabees type!). So, in the interests of accuracy, we are guessing that this is why Twitter continue to take the ‘no editing’ line.

So you pretty much need to either live with that typo or awkward photo crop, or delete the post and start again.

Conclusion: To change an image on Twitter, you have to delete the whole post and start again.

How to make amends on a published Facebook post

At last! Something that Facebook does that the other platforms don’t.

For a very long time, it wasn’t possible to delete or add images to a post after posting them to the live platform. However you can now do this, and it’s very simple.

As with all social platforms, you look for the three dots at the top right of the post you would like to edit.  Click this and select ‘edit post’.  Per the other platforms, you can edit the text and change the tagged companies in the copy on the post.  You can also add captions to images already on the post and remove or add images and videos to the post too by clicking the ‘edit all’ option that appears on the carousel of images, which is a great step forward!

Conclusion: You can add to, change or delete an image on a Facebook post that has already been published! Hooray!

However: There is a ‘however’.  This will only work if you scheduled or posted the post natively within Facebook and won’t work if you used a third party tool like Hootsuite or Buffer.

So, on the whole, you have to get it right first time.  Just like in the world of engineering where you are advised to ‘measure it twice, cut it once’, so it goes when paying attention to what you post to social, as mopping up after yourself can be a real pain.

 

Read more

We hope that you found this article useful. Take a look at the other social media help articles we’ve put together:

We’re sure there will be additions to this list, so maybe bookmark this page if you found it helpful.


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