“We know memories are reconstructive. It’s certainly possible that we are reconstructing our memories to make them more in line with photos that we are taking, or with photos that others take and show to us,” says Kimberley Wade, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Warwick who studies false memories. “If someone shows you a photo that you didn’t take, it may show part of an event that you were at, but you don’t remember. And maybe that does become your memory. You may no longer know if the photo is something that you actually saw at the event.”

And remembering things from an outside point of view may have its drawbacks. Research has shown that when you remember an experience from a third-person perspective, you have less emotional connections to the memory.

But Niforitos for one argues that rather than distorting your memories, looking at photos that other people took at a shared event could ultimately enhance your memory of it.

“It depends on how you define experience. You could certainly argue that those shared experiences are your memories too,” he says. “It’s possible to build a system that supports this type of collaborative co-experience.”

Limit your snaps?

Similarly, though we are curating our memories by editing photos, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“Most false memory experts would say that inaccuracy is a good thing for many reasons,” says Wade. “If you change your political views at some point for example, you might go back and think that your political views were more in line with what they are now. We want to think we are stable people. We remember our relationships in a better light, we were remember ourselves in a way that is more in line with who we want to be. Some distortion is good for our well-being.”