What would you do if a friend posted a picture you hated online - then refused to take it down! Four writers share their embarrassing snaps and explain how to approach this tangled mix of friendship, ego and modern mores…

She has at least two extra chins, a misshapen nose and an expression of shocked horror, as though she has just seen her own reflection in a mirror.

No one would dispute that the portrait of mining billionaire Gina Rinehart, which is currently hanging in the National Gallery of Australia, is unflattering.

Now, according to reports, Australia's richest woman has demanded that the picture be removed altogether from an exhibition by award-winning portraitist Vincent Namatjira, whose rather inflammatory response was that he 'paints the world as he sees it'.

We might not be billionaires, but most of us have shared Gina Rinehart's painful dilemma. In an era of smartphone filters and photo-editing apps, we are used to perfecting the image we present to the world.

The unflattering portrait of mining billionaire Gina Rinehart, which is currently hanging in the National Gallery of Australia

But what happens when someone else posts an unflattering picture of us on social media? Or frames a photograph of us squinting into the sun, spinach in our teeth, 10lb heavier than we'd like to be? What is the etiquette when it comes to requesting someone take down — in real life or online — a ghastly picture of us?

Here, four writers explain how to approach this tangled mix of friendship, ego and modern mores…

Haunted by friend's bikini beach 'tag'

Susannah Jowitt

The day I became a control freak about my 'image' was the day social media introduced the notion of 'tagging' — where someone, often on a whim, alerts you to a posted picture in which you feature by linking your name to it.

This, I was soon to discover, required a whole new level of hyper-vigilance.

One summer, a friend tagged me in a photo taken of her and me, lying on sun-loungers, early on in a summer holiday. 'Not even remotely beach ready' was the not-very-flattering caption. She wasn't kidding.

I am sprawled across the photo, occupying most of its bandwidth, bare legs akimbo, all my flesh threatening to burst out and make a break for the border. It wouldn't be out of place in an exhibition of paintings by Rubens or Lucian Freud. 

However this was a photo on Facebook in 2014, when most people were posting pictures of their skinny little legs silhouetted against a sunset glowing through their thigh gap with the hashtag #hotdoglegs. The only hashtag that springs to mind here is #filletofbeefenoughforeveryone.

Susannah Jowitt was 'mortified' after a friend uploaded this photo from their holiday in 2014

At the time, I wasn't sure what to be most mortified about.

First indrawn breath: there is now a photo of me out there in a bikini. I would never, ever post such a thing. I wear a bikini to tan my tum, with only trusted friends in attendance, not for any fashion reason and never, ever for a more callous public environment.

Yet here I am in all my two-piece glory, ready to scare the horses in every corner of Facebook.

Second gasp of horror: there's just so much of me.

I actually have the opposite of body dysmorphia — I swan through life thinking my body looks better than it really does. In mirrors, I always look at myself from exactly the same angle: hands on hips, pelvis tilted forward, legs half-crossed.

I look incredible (literally). After 55 years I have nailed my public pose.

But this... this was the sort of candid camera snap I would never countenance posting. There's the false summit of my belly then the twin peaks of my embonpoint, towering over an only loosely tied bikini top, like a massive landslip poised to collapse at any moment over the viewer.

Third sigh of despair: my friend had 800 followers even then and, worse, 200 mutual friends with me. There was no escaping this. I asked her to take it down.

She laughed and said, 'don't be daft'. But at least she offered to de-tag me, reassuring me that it would no longer show up on my feed.

At that point I was new to the tagging game and didn't realise it had already been up for two days. The damage was done. The worst moment was when I realised one of my colleagues at the school I worked in had seen it. Mortifying doesn't quite cover it — just like the bikini.

The truth is, I am still haunted by the knowledge the photo is out there. The other day, a decade after it first went up on Facebook, it popped up in my friend's feed as a ten-year memory.

She immediately reposted it — on Instagram as well — with the caption: 'Those were the days. We didn't realise how good we had it.' I couldn't believe she'd done it again. But actually she's right. I look at it now and I don't see the flab. I see the tan and the smile and the fabulous chutzpah of a woman in her 40s wearing a bikini.

So, I message my friend and thank her for slaying this particular demon.

'I know — we look good,' she messages back.

That's a stretch — again, just like the bikini straps — but I'll take it.

Party passions and 'hangxiety' on film

Flora Gill

Everyone who's ever drunk has at some point woken up the next day with that hangover anxiety — hangxiety — the 'Oh God what did I do' nightmare.

But for my generation, this came with an added horror — the morning after negotiation of social media photos.

Nothing is more millennial than the photo albums we used to post on Facebook. Fifty images all from one party uploaded with no filters, no edits and captions like 'what comes before part B?' (Answer: Partayyy!')

Flora Gill dressed as a fly at a fancy dress party where a boy also told her that she looked like a drag queen

There'd always be a few pics you had to beg your mate to take down — the bad angles, the awful clothes, the inappropriate poses.

Older generations had the opportunity to mess up with no permanent record. Maybe the story becomes gossip and, if you're famous, ends up in a bestselling memoir, but that's about it. It's much harder for the young to hide — you can't just tear up a physical photo. If it's online, it's everywhere, forever.

I think the ease with which your mistake can be shared and follow you online, is one of the reasons so many Gen Zs are choosing not to drink (a YouGov study for the Portman Group showed that 39 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds are teetotal). Yet, looking back on the photos I remember desperately and unsuccessfully trying to get erased from social media, I'm surprised that none of them bother me like they used to.

There's a photo of me joyfully dressed as a fly.

At the fancy dress party in question, a boy told me I looked like a drag queen, so the next day, I tried to remove any trace of it.

It's still up online and I now see I look fabulous and no longer take that as the insult it was intended to be.

In another photo at an 'anything but clothes party', I could see love bites visibly on display on my neck, from a boy I wasn't yet 'seeing'. I thought people would view me as a slut if they saw it, so again tried to erase it. He's now my fiance so the images make me laugh.

Ms Gill in a photo from an 'anything but clothes' party where love bites are visible on her neck from a boy she wasn't yet 'seeing' at the time

Another shows me at a foam party, and, when I saw it, I begged my friend to take it down because I thought I looked fat and had a bit of belly showing. This last one flummoxes me the most because I look tiny in the photo.

Today, much bigger than I was then, my first thought is that I would kill for the figure I used to be ashamed of, and my second thought is that in ten years I'll probably look back on the body I have now and wonder why I ever felt anything but love for it.

I once tried to have a physical photo taken down. My grandma had put up a photo of our family on her mantelpiece. Everyone else looked adorable but I was smiling so hard I had a double chin and all my gums were showing.

'Please don't put it up' I begged. 'I don't look pretty.' 'Who cares about pretty? You look so happy,' she said leaving it up.

Now, looking back on the pictures I tried and failed to have wiped from the internet, I think my granny's words ring more true than ever.

As you get older, looking back on 'happy' seems far more valuable than 'pretty' — even if there were times when you looked a little worse for wear.

I'd take it off my parents' wall

Julie Cook

The image is of a young woman smiling, clutching her graduation scroll and proudly wearing a black mortarboard. It symbolises achievement, the end of my university life and the attainment of my bachelor's degree.

And I hate it.

I always have from the moment I clapped eyes on it. In fact, I hated this picture — taken in 1999, when I was 21 — so much that when my mother put it up in her living room, I asked her to take it down. She refused, slightly hurt, and when I begged, merely rolled her eyes at me.

And so, if friends or — God forbid — boyfriends came over, I'd do it myself. I'd take it down and shove it in a drawer, deliberately bashing it in the hope the frame would break.

Julie Cook in her hated graduation photo which her mother refused to take down from her living room wall

You see, I don't look like that.

I certainly don't look like that now and I didn't think I looked like it then.

Round, chubby face; vacant yet simpering expression; slight cross-eyed, badly dyed, red-brown hair. Oh God, I hated it.

When my godfather proudly put the same picture on display on his sideboard, I couldn't use the direct tactics I had at home, but instead attempted a subtler approach. 'I don't really look my best there,' I told him, willing him to understand the fragility of my ego.

'But it's your graduation photo,' he replied, as if what I looked like didn't matter at all.

He saw the mortarboard. I saw someone who needed to be taught how to put make-up on and how to smile so she didn't look like a gullible 14-year-old.

One time when I visited, I very nearly put the wretched photograph in my handbag, but instead made do with placing it face down on his dresser in what I hoped was a clear enough signal.

It was there again, in all its saccharine, pallid-faced glory the next time I visited.

I still hate it. I have a version which I keep hidden in the darkest corner of my garage, in a box covered in cobwebs.

My parents' copy, however, is still on the wall in my childhood home, a quarter of a century of lowered self-esteem later.

Howlers - Even of gorgeous me 

Samantha Brick

You could be forgiven for assuming that someone as gloriously gorgeous as moi couldn't possibly take a bad picture even if her life (or ego) depended on it. Well, you'd be wrong.

When it comes to my looks and physique, I have lashings of confidence with a teeny pinch of vanity, but there are times when a picture has been posted online that doesn't meet the mental image I have of myself.

Samantha Brick in the head and shoulders snap with her gums on display and a frightful orange tan that she hates but her husband posted anyway

Sometimes I've done a double take along the lines of 'surely that can't be me', because a picture has been nothing short of horrendous.

Friends or acquaintances can be naughty, choosing to post images which flatter them and most definitely not me.

The trouble is, once the visual clangers are out there, there is very little you can do to pull them back in.

I am very mindful of this. I never post images without someone's permission. If I find cute teenage pictures of me with my school friends, I never share — not least because one wore Deirdre Barlow glasses and another had one of those godawful 1980s perms.

The same rule of thumb, however, is not observed by my husband, Pascal.

Pascal is a keen photographer. Never a day goes by when he's not pointing his Nikon at yours truly, directing me at a beauty spot or pulling me in for a selfie.

My husband is also an insomniac. This means that he frequently posts pictures on his Instagram page in the early hours of the morning, before I've been consulted about his choice.

I'll wake up to 'likes' of a picture of me not always looking my best.

As a result there are some real horrors on his feeds.

Take the head and shoulders snap of me when we'd just met (and before social media really got going).

Gurning, with my gums on display. A frightful Tango tan. It's only in midlife I have come to recognise that I don't suit Ronseal-coloured skin.

And then there's the haircut. I might have thought I looked like Rachel from Friends, but in fact I looked like Rachel from accounts.

And yet I suppose I should be grateful my husband loves me enough to see past these photographic howlers.

His feed is a celebration of our marriage, not a tribute page to my beauty. I can live with that.