Embarrassing Old Photo

"Goddamnit, you showed them the picture of me with the dildo, didn't you."

— Marten Reed (to his mother), Questionable Content

An old photo album is opened up, and you're enjoying some reminders of your past...

Until "it" shows up. You didn't realize it at the time, but that picture makes you want to crawl under a rock. Worse, everyone else loves it, having plenty of laughs. Fortunately, this rarely has any lasting effects aside from everyone having a chuckle at your expense. If you're lucky, you are the only one with such a picture. This can apply to home videos and slideshows as well.

Can be used to show that I Was Quite a Fashion Victim.

For some reason, "Embarrassing baby pictures" often consist of the subject lying naked, butt-up on a fur (usually bearskin) rug.

Definitely Truth in Television: Amazingly Embarrassing Parents (some of whom have only reached Amazingly Embarrassing status because their kids are easily-embarrassed) will rush to show their kids' friends these. It's a blessing in disguise to catch Mom showing these pictures to one's boyfriend, girlfriend, or significant other; it's Mom's stamp of approval of him or her. A rarer variant would be the child finding old photos of their parents, and they would be the one having plenty of laughs instead.

A Sister Trope to Embarrassing Slide, Embarrassing Ad Gig, Unflattering ID Photo.

Compare Old Shame.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Somehow weaponized in Cells at Work!:
  • Dendritic Cell's ability to activate Naive T Cells is depicted as him showing old photos of the rest of the squadron, which in turn reassures the Naive T he's talking to and allows him to join the fight as a musclebound Effector T Cell. We soon get a shot of the other T cells getting "agitated" (depicted as sudden chills) from sensing this taking place.
  • A later arc also plays on the "agitation" angle by having him tossing a whole box of photos into a crowd. The cells get so embarrassed they basically go into overdrive, combating the oncoming threat.
• Can apply to Jeremy in A Cruel God Reigns, although not in the cute "I'm so embarrassed!" way. It happens when he finds the photos Greg took of him being tortured which Ian kept in part so that if Jeremy was ever put on trial for Make It Look Like an Accident Vehicular Sabotage-ing Greg, he could claim self-defense, and partly because he was in shock over the whole thing. This incident leads to one of Jeremy's biggest Freak Out moments and doesn't help his slight case of Being Tortured Makes You Evil.
• Mina has access to a bunch of these of Akira in the Dance in the Vampire Bund manga.
• Girls Bravo: In episode 13, Fukuyama uses a baby picture of Kirie wetting the bed to blackmail her into entering the "Girls Fight!" competition and offers to give it back only if she won. She advances all the way to the finals, where she's defeated by Lilica. Fukuyama calls it even and tears up the photo anyway, vowing to keep it a secret, since he at least got to see her in a g-string bikini.
• GTO: The Early Years:
  • In Chapter 3, Mariko and Ayumi destroy the boys' reputations as cool boyfriend-material types by taping up a photo of them in Bōsōzoku clothing exposing their penises. One wonders why the hell they agreed to take that photo in the first place, at 15 years old.
  • This is the solution to Eikichi and Ryuji's situation with Yokokawa. It turns out they went to junior high together, and have a photo from then of him pooping in public. They offer it to him in exchange for wiping out the 100 million yen debt they owed him...if he re-enacts the photo and lets them take another.
• In the third volume of the High School D×D light novel, Issei's mother shows the members of the Occult Research Club a collection of these, including the obligatory "naked toddler at the beach" photo. The funny part, she's actually promised that she would do this when he had a lot of girlfriends, though her hopes dwindled as Issei became quite the pervert.
• Itazura Na Kiss, where Nakoi has plenty of baby photos of himself dressed in girl's clothing, as the mother wanted a daughter and didn't want to purchase new boy's clothing. This photo was used as blackmail by Kotoko in order to get tutoring.
• In Kyo Kara Maoh!, Jenny (a.k.a. Miko) is always showing pictures of Yuuri from childhood. She used to dress him up like a girl because she wanted a daughter (but instead got sons).
• In Non Non Biyori, Natsumi finds an old videotape while cleaning her room. She thinks it contains old anime episodes, so she plays it. It turns out that it's actually a video of her as a child when she said she'd marry her brother.
• PriPara: Shogo has lots, and Yui loves using them to tease him.
• Ranma ½: Genma shows embarrassing photos of Ranma to Ukyô and Akane as part of Ranma's training at one point. (Ranma is supposed to be learning how to keep his cool.) One of the photos shows a young Ranma crying after wetting the bed. Another shows him as a teenager running away from a bunch of cats. Naked.
• Sgt. Frog:
  • At the start of an episode Aki, is showing everyone some old photos of Natsumi and Fuyuki when they were kids. She shows an old photo where after having wet the bed, Fuyuki has been hung on the washing line next to the blanket he soiled. Fuyuki quickly tries to cover up the photo.
  • A whole episode revolves around Momoka enlisting the aid of Natsumi and Koyuki to steal a piece of art from her father's collection before Fuyuki can see it. It's a portrait of her as a baby... naked.
• Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle: Chapter 132 revolves around Demon King Twilight and Demon Cleric independently attempting to recover old photos of themselves that they had hidden in a previously off-limits area^note Twilight's pictures are of the "embarrassing little kid" variety, while Demon Cleric's show him going through the demon equivalent of a "punk" phase. Naturally, Princess Syalis stumbles across the photos before either of them can find them.
• In Wagnaria!!, Hiroomi has several pictures of Sôta as a child where Sôta is dressed as a girl. (As Sôta had only older sisters, and most of his clothes are hand-me-downs).

Comic Books

• In Angel & Faith, Connor is confronted with some embarrassing old religious iconography.
  Faith: "There's a resemblance, all right. What's that around your neck?"
  Connor: "I used to wear the body parts of demons I'd killed." *Facepalm* "I was a kid."
• The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016): Etta Candy drops out of college after her parents use an old picture of her with hair removal cream on her face as an advertisement in all the local papers and post it up on a billboard near the school. She'd been thinking about joining a USO tour anyway, but after that, she fled the states in a hurry.
• In one issue of Viz, Sid the Sexist actually manages to persuade a girl to come home with him - only for his mother to intercept them as they enter the house, drag them into the living room and proceed to totally ruin the whole thing by showing the girl albums upon albums of Sid's baby photos.

Comic Strips

• Breaking Cat News: "Mommy's little pirate ballerina!" (Elvis is about to scream.)
• Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, states in an Anniversary collection that there should be a statute of limitations on old yearbook photos for just this reason.
  Calvin: Is this you with the keg and the "Party Naked" T-shirt?
  Calvin: Who's the bimbo with you?
  Father: That 'bimbo' is your mother!
• Zits:
  • When Jeremy's mom chaperones a school field trip, he's horrified when she starts showing all the girls in his class baby photos of him.
  • Jeremy frequently makes fun of old photos of his parents dressed in fashions from the 60s and 70s.

Fan Works

• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic blog Ask the Royal Sisters Cadance gets her mother-in-law Twilight Velvet to give her an album of Shining's baby photos in one sketch. Celestia does the same with Cadance to Shining in another. When Shining and Cadance actually look at the photos, however, they find them cute and don't remember why they were so embarrassed in the first place.
• In Belonging by writerzero, Beast Boy and Raven go to Kishar, who used to help raise Beast Boy when he was a kid and is now training him. While he goes flying, she uses the opportunity to show Raven a few of his childhood photos... a good number of them having him naked. Beast Boy is scared out of his wits when he sees that.
• Dr. Brainstorm's tenth-grade photo serves as this in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series.
  Jack: Nice braces, by the way.
• In A Convoluted Matter by Neeko96, Tom gives Adrien an album for photos, with a few of a younger Marinette already inside. Adrien really laughs at one of her as a toddler after an attempt to help at the kitchen... despite Mari doing her best to snatch the album away.
• In The Elements of Harmony and the Savior of Worlds, Megan, Molly, and Danny have plenty of these of Luna and Celestia, since it was the three of them who raised the two.
• In Midoriya Izuku. Quirk: Cuteness, Inko Midoriya shows All Might/Toshinori Yagi an album of photos from Izuku's childhood as well as telling the hero embarrassing stories about her son.
• In My Huntsman Academia, it's implied that Izuku and Katsuki's moms kept pictures of their sons in their Toshinori onesies from when they were kids. Coco tries to press for details, but Izuku flees into the Mountain Glenn crowd before she can get anything out of him.
• Naru-Hina Chronicles: Shikamaru really hated it when his mother showed pictures from his childhood to Temari.
• Oni Ga Shiku Series: Izuku considers showing everyone in Aldera middle school Bakugou's old childhood pictures so he gets angry enough to fight him. However, he doesn't go through with it.
• Discussed in The Second Try. Fortunately for the child in question, any photos that might have been taken were lost when the family was sent back in time.
  Asuka: And as good parents, it is, of course, our duty to take photos of her first birthday, wearing a cute hat and her whole face smeared full of cake to torture her with in a few years.
• This fanart of Steven Universe has Steven, Garnet, and Amethyst stumbling upon a photo of Pearl dressed as a baby (because she was just trying to satisfy Rose's fascination with babies), all the while that the blushing Pearl is standing right behind them.
• Total Drama Legacy: A Running Gag in the chapter "Aftermath: Blast from the Past" is embarrassing home videos of Cody Jr. as a child being accidentally shown.
• Turnabout Storm: Embarrassing photos of Rainbow Dash the victim was carrying are submitted to the courtroom in for all to see (except the viewers); cue massive laughter from the audience. Poor Rainbow Dash...
• In Unfamiliar Patterns, Rarity's parents show off embarrassing foalhood photos of her during her "nudist" phase to her fashion idol Sapphire Shores.
• White Sheep (RWBY): After Pyrrha is kidnapped by Salem, Salem manages to bring her around with Jaune's baby pictures. Cinder, who isn't fond of Pyrrha being there at all, is horrified when she realizes that she's in some of them.
  Salem: She used to dress up like a Grimm and run around growling like a Beowolf. You should see the pictures where I used to bathe her and Jaune together when they were both little. She used to make him call her the pirate queen. She was so adorable!

Film — Animated

• Despicable Me has a scene where Gru's mother shows the girl an old photo of Gru as a kid wearing a "traditional" outfit, which is embarrassing as Margo thinks he looks like a girl and his mother agrees, adding that he looks like an ugly girl.
  Gru: Mom. Not cool...
• In Kung Fu Panda 2, Po's father, Mr. Ping, packs a bundle for him to take away on his next adventure. Among the things he packs are paintings of Po during his childhood, including one of Po taking a piggy-back ride on his back. Po's True Companions are amused.
• In Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas, Max brings his girlfriend home from college to meet his dad. At one point while Max is proudly showing her old pictures of himself as a child graduating high school, Goofy brings in an enlarged photo of Max naked as a baby (as pictured above).

Film — Live-Action

• In Bad Boys (1995), Marcus's wife shows his partner Mike a photo of him with a 'fro.
• In The Departed, that's how Sullivan thinks about Madolyn's childhood photograph and demands it be removed from the flat when she moves in with him.
• During the party in the first quarter of The Descent, Juno brings out a photograph of her, Beth and Sarah; in it, they're obviously fresh from mountain-climbing, and sporting utterly manic grins. In the laughter that follows, even Beth mutters "look at the state of us." And then Sarah starts reminiscing on something her dead husband used to say and suddenly the scene isn't quite so funny anymore.
• In a non-comic use of this trope, Michéle, the protagonist of Elle, is dogged by a haunting photograph of her taken as a child, just after her father killed 27 of their neighbors after they objected to something he did related to Christmas, in which she is half-naked and covered with ash, staring vacantly toward the camera, that became the signature image related to her father's crime.
• In Silver Streak, Gene Wilder is accused of being a murderer and appearing in the newspapers at the station is his old driver's license picture. When Richard Pryor points it out to him, Wilder's character finishes his sentence with "I hate that picture".

Literature

• Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
  • The Ugly Truth:
    • Gammie advises Greg to not let anybody take his picture while he is going through puberty, showing old photos of Greg's father and other relatives.
    • Greg learns that one of his uncles looked exactly like him as a kid. He plans to save up for plastic surgery.
    • An illustration depicts a picture of Greg and Rodrick freaking out on Santa's lap, captioned "Season's Greetings."
  • Cabin Fever: Greg discusses an old photo album that shows a picture of him crying while on a pony ride. According to him, he was scared of the pony's handler and not the pony itself, but his mom cropped the handler out of the picture.
  • Wrecking Ball: Rodrick once fell asleep in a hot tub, getting his skin wrinkly for two weeks, and got his picture taken a few days later.
• The Emerald City of Oz has an illustration (by long-time illustrator John R. Neill) of Dorothy and her friends (and Aunt Em and Uncle Henry) facing a statue of her as originally illustrated by W. W. Denslow in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
• In Judy Blume's Fudge novels, Peter's parents have one of him as a toddler, naked and holding a broom.
• In Penn and Teller's How to Play with Your Food, Penn & Teller have a cruel trick to avoid your parents showing embarrassing Halloween photos to your future dates.
• In Shaman Blues, Witkacy has an old picture of him with his ex hanging on the wall. It suddenly becomes very embarrassing to him when she pays him a visit.

Live-Action TV

• The subplot to an episode of A.N.T. Farm is all about Lexi trying to build Angus's time machine to undo an embarrassing yearbook photo of where her hair was frizzy. The Stinger revealed that Angus going back in time to that date is what ruined Lexi's hair during the photo in the first place.
• In the Cold Case episode "Stand Up and Holler", Dets. Vera and Miller are showing each other pictures of themselves from high school during the Medley Exit.
• Community:
  • Jeff's cynical campaign for school office is derailed by opponent Annie, who publicly airs an old audition video he'd done for MTV's "The Real World" where he's playing George Michael.
  • One of Colorado's bars has photos showcasing Shirley's past as a barfly plastered all over its walls.
• Criminal Minds:
  • One of these is used to prove that yes, Emily Prentiss used to be a Goth. With terrible '80s Hair.
  • In the episode "I Love You, Tommy Brown", Garcia is desperately trying to get Morgan to pick up the phone and one of the voicemails she leaves is:
    Garcia: Derek Morgan, this is the 67^th message I left you. If you don't answer I will be forced to show everyone that nude photo of you from art class, and not the good one either. I'm being serious.
• On Friends the friends are looking at photos from Ross and Monica's childhood. Joey says he's found "Monica naked!" Ross, embarrassed, admits "No, no, that would be me again."
• An early episode of Gilmore Girls has Lorelai hiding several of these from her daughter's boyfriend.
• In a House episode, there's a photo which shows House as a cheerleader in high school. When Cuddy sees it, she dismisses it as fake; however, at the end of the episode, it's revealed that while that specific photo was faked, House really was a cheerleader.
• Quinn Fabray from Glee has an embarrassing photo of when she was fat with braces and glasses.
• Barney of How I Met Your Mother has an Embarrassing Old Videotape, from his days as a lovelorn hippie. Robin has one as well; we're initially led to believe that it's porn, but it's actually a music video of her teenage one-hit-wonder "Let's Go To The Mall".
• Sal of Impractical Jokers has an unfortunate one that periodically crops up as an "Employee of the Year" photo, a slide in a presentation, etc.
• Jonas had this trope weaponized in "Frantic Romantic". Macy finally gets rid of Fiona Sky_the celebrity who kept intruding in Joe's life by faking a relationship with him_ by threatening to release an embarrassing 9th grade yearbook photo of her when she was ugly.
• Just Shoot Me!: Elliot is about to go to a class reunion, noting how he used to frequently be picked on. Maya claims it couldn't have been that bad but then he shows her an old high school photo. She then exclaims, "Oh my God! You were a little fatty!"
• Kim's Convenience: Kimchee puts up a childhood photo of Shannon dressed as Anne of Green Gables in the office, with a pun reminding the employees to clean their dishes. Shannon strikes back with a childhood photo of Kimchee, but it becomes awkward when seeing him with his Disappeared Dad in the photo makes him consider reconnecting with him.
• On Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, John invokes the trope on his segment on the "right to be forgotten" — in other words, the idea that people should be allowed to force the Internet to remove embarrassing stories or images about them. John doesn't think there is such a right, mostly because removing things from the Internet is virtually impossible. However, to mitigate the effect of embarrassing things on the Internet, he starts a campaign called "Mutually Assured Embarrassment", asking everyone to post the most embarrassing pictures of themselves so that they would neither be hidden nor be revealed against their will. John starts off himself by showing two old pictures of himself — one of him as a child wearing a sweater with his name on it (which he admits he kind of likes), and one of him as an incredibly dorky teenager which he clearly doesn't like:
  John: You better have fucking done that, or I've made a horrible mistake. And I think I've just made a horrible mistake.
• The Millers' title sequence is a greatest hits parade of family photo trends over the past several decades. Most haven't aged particularly well. The title sequence is also a Freeze-Frame Bonus because it's made up of collages of old photos of the cast that zoom out to become Miller family portraits. Freeze-framing the sequence reveals some real-life embarrassing old photos from the cast's past.
• Not super-embarrassing, but an episode of Power Rangers: Dino Thunder has Kira and Dr. O going through his old Ranger stuff. She finds a picture of him from ten years ago and teases him about his long hair. Dr. O responds "Hey, it was in style at the time!" Of course, this is funnier for long-time fans, since the picture is a promotional image from Power Rangers' second season and depicts Tommy as the White Ranger.
• On Schitt's Creek David discovers a high school yearbook photo of Stevie with an unflattering haircut that Stevie says made her classmates as if she was going to join the LPGA tour. In retaliation, Stevie finds an unflattering head-shot of former child/teen actor David online. David says the photo got him a two-episode arc on Dateline and his performance got him laid.
• Similarly in Shake it Up, Rocky blackmails Ty into dancing with her and CeCe in the talent show with an embarrassing childhood photo of him trick-or-treating dressed as Princess Leia.
• In the Supernatural episode "Devil May Care" (S09, Ep02), Kevin uncovers a photo of Sergeant Bates doing jello shots off a naked guy in a Luchador mask.
• On That '70s Show, Eric worries that Kitty will show Donna all his old pictures when they start hanging out (despite the fact that they grew up together and she was there during the awkward times). They both laugh at his fantasy sequence, and he eventually accepts how ridiculous he's being. Then the stinger is the two women going through a photo album, discussing all the embarrassing pictures of Eric.
• In White Collar, the infamous time when Peter grew a mustache. As a Continuity Nod, when there's a Whole Episode Flashback to that time period, Peter has the mustache until he's convinced to shave it off.

Music

• Mentioned in "All Too Well" by Taylor Swift:
  Photo album on the counter, your cheeks were turning red
  You used to be a little kid with glasses in a twin sized bed

Pro Wrestling

• D-Generation X managed to pull this one off twice in the same segment. After Edge and Randy Orton dressed up as DX (complete with a fake nose and sideburns on Edge and leather chaps and a blonde wig on Orton), Triple H showed on the TitanTron a couple of photos Randy Orton had done in the past — one with him naked under a Modesty Towel — and implied the photos were very popular with the gay community. He then "accidentally" put a picture of Shawn Michaels (his partner) up on the screen; Shawn's Playgirl spread from the late 90s. Shawn is understandably not amused by this.
  • DX also pulled out an Embarrassing Old Video: Vince McMahon's performance of "Stand Back". So Bad It's Hilarious. Chris Benoit and Chris Jericho played the same video on the TitanTron back in 2001.

Stand-Up Comedy

• The Blue-Collar Comedians Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall, and Larry the Cable Guy have a bit where they show embarrassing photos of each other in front of the audience. The one that gets the biggest reaction? Larry in a hotel room in his undies...with a sheep.
  Larry: It was such a cute daggum sheep.

Video Games

• Disgaea: Hour of Darkness: Apparently, Laharl has one, but it's never actually shown to the player.
• Endless Frontier: After the main protagonist Haken Browning learned of his origins as a Super-Soldier Artificial Human, his Robot Girl companion Aschen Brodel reminds him that she has in her memory banks video footage of him growing up from infancy. He demands that the data be deleted.
• Escape from Monkey Island: Guybrush Threepwood teases his wife when he sees a portrait of her as a baby with her grandfather. He stops when she threatens to take out his baby pictures.
• Idol Manager: One possible event consists of old photos of one of the idols getting posted online, revealing her to be Formerly Fat. The Internet being the Internet, this will have consequences for the idol's mental well-being.
• The Invasion Of Nintendo: Ken Lobb's Jewish Mother shows the agents pictures of him being potty trained until he gives them more info on Killer Instinct.
• The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night: When the Chronicler is showing Spyro his own story history, the book includes a page showing Sparx's own birth. Sparx finds this greatly embarrassing, and covers up the image until the other two move on.
• In Love & Pies, the treasure that Amelia and Joe find in the café basement turns out to be an old painting of what seems to be themselves reenacting the story of Adam and Eve, complete with Scenery Censors. When they pose with it for a picture for Eve's new article, Joe covers the painting with his frying pan while Amelia covers her kid daughter Kate's eyes.

Web Animation

• DC Super Hero Girls: Batgirl's "Hero of the Month" short ends with her being embarrassed by her father showing a baby picture where she's making a mess with spaghetti.
• Homestar Runner:
  • In the early Strong Bad Email "stand-up", Strong Sad waits for Strong Bad to leave before showing the audience a video of a young Strong Bad performing a very awkward stand-up comedy routine.
  • Strong Bad watches this trope play out on TV in "sibbie". He even describes it as such: "Oh, this is the one where the guy's mom shows the guy's girlfriend the pictures of the guy when he was a baby."
• RWBY: Jaune mentions early on that his seven sisters put his hair in pigtails at least once. When the team ends up at the house of his eldest sister, Saphron, Jaune is annoyed to discover that she has a picture of the event framed in her living room.
• Sam & Mickey: In "The Attic", we have Barbie's old home Betamax videos.
  Yasmin: (watching the videos with Barbie's "little sisters" during The Stinger) I like your kindergarten dance concert, but my favorite is where you're a baby and you poop on your momma's white pantsuit, and she tells you that "you'll never amount to anything". So funny!
  Barbie: (to Ken) Let's go to Home Depot and buy a mallet. I'm smashing that Betamax player when they go to sleep.

Webcomics

• Assigned Male: When Frank visits Steph's house to work on a group project, Steph asks her dad to take down a pre-transition photo of her.
• The Call of Whatever: A pair of Cthulhu's Star-Spawn claim that the Necronomicon is actually their family photo album, and the Brown Note effects on humans are attributed to their baby photos.
• Cheap Thrills: Shortly before Jeordie's graduation, his mom shows his girlfriend photos of him as a baby bathing in the bathtub, dressed as a fireman, and dressed in a pink onesie, to Jeordie's complete embarrassment.
• Forestdale: In order to humiliate the school bully Katie Kiel during one of her livestreams, Izabell pulls out a photo of her gorging herself on halloween candy in a rather unflattering onesie and tells all of Katie's viewers where they can go to purchase their own copies of the humiliating picture if they're interested. Needless to say Katie cut the livestream right then and there.
• Grrl Power: Alluded during Sydney's interview at Archon
  Gwen: [pointing at the walls] Normally we find embarrassing photos of you online and print them up real big.
• Pixie and Brutus: When Pixie begins gushing over how cute Brutus looks in his rookie photograph, Brutus protests with embarrassment that he only looked cute because he hadn't grown up yet.
• In Questionable Content, there exists a photo of Marten as a small child innocently waving around a giant (think "size of his torso") floppy dildo, which his mother insists is the cutest thing ever. We get to see it at one point, and it actually is pretty cute.
• Rascals: Mitzu used one to track down Jazmin for her client. The photo was later revealed to be of a drunk Jazmin making out with her equally drunk sister Reiko.
• In Something*Positive, when Davan's family was having a get together for Thanksgiving, his father promised his mother to only show his girlfriend, Branwen, his trophies and art pieces. So Davan's father proceeded to give Branwen a slideshow consisting of Davan's "performance pieces" over the years, such as, "Look, mommy, I have a peepee".
• There's a scene in Wapsi Square where Monica is embarrassed by a bunch of her teenage photos where she's wearing nerdy glasses and hair. Later on, she shows one to her friends and they think it's cute. And she does replicate the look later on for a night in with some other (supernatural) friends, so...

Web Original

• Pretty much the entire point of My Parents Were Awesome.
• Ian from Statless and Tactless made a lot of stereotypical monochrome photography during his brief 'emo' phase. Joe has collected every one of them so he'll never live it down.
• STFU, Parents documents parents who use Facebook to this effect.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: "Memory of a Memory" features a variant; Finn pulls Marceline into his memories, and Marceline accidentally sees a scene of Finn as a toddler, dancing in his underwear and singing a silly song.
  Young Finn: I'm a buff baby that can dance like a man!
  I can shake-a my fanny, I can shake-a my can!
  I'm a tough tootin' baby, I can punch-a your buns!
  Punch-a your buns, I can punch-a your buns!
  If you're an evil witch, I will punch you for fun!
• In the All Grown Up! episode, "Petition This", Kimi starts a petition drive to ban the use of cell phones from school. Around the same time, Tommy is preparing a movie for the Finsters' tenth wedding anniversary, using pictures from the present and the past. Angelica, who isn't going to stand for Kimi's petition, browses Tommy's computer for a photo embarrassing enough to humiliate Kimi while Tommy has fallen asleep from all his hard work. She settles on one of Kimi's Rugrats (1991) counterpart sitting on a potty chair and crying, which she puts on posters with a speech balloon saying "Quick! Someone hand me a cell phone!"
• Subverted in the series finale of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Katara, wanting to cheer everyone up, attempts this. It doesn't work, and in fact ends up bringing the mood down further, because...
  Katara: I was looking for cooking pots in the attic, and I found this! [flourishes a scroll with a painting of a baby next to a sandcastle] Look at Baby Zuko! Isn't he cute?
  [everyone croons; Zuko scowls]
  Katara: Oh, lighten up, I was just teasing.
  Zuko: [flatly] That's not me. It's my father.
• Biker Mice from Mars. In the episode "A Scent, a Memory, a Far Distant Cheese", Charley, Modo, and Throttle get a hold of Vinnie's very embarrassing baby picture. Oddly plot-relevant, as it is used to help defeat that episode's villains.
• Bob's Burgers: In "The Trouble With Doubles" Tina is revealed to have a video from when she was a toddler where she sings a song to her poop before flushing it and then immediately starts crying. While Linda finds it cute and loves to keep that video tape around, Tina hates it and tries to get rid of it. Unfortunately, Tina is forced to show it to her friends in order to calm them down after they're traumatized by a monster movie.
• Captain Flamingo: "Past Imperfect" has Milo's family showing off their old baby pictures of Milo from their old album, much to his embarrassment.
• In Code Lyoko episode "Cold Sweat", thanks to Odd an embarrassing photo of Yumi ends up in the school newspaper. It shows her disguised as a fairy for Halloween, with a blonde wig and pink dress. Pink really isn't Yumi's color.
• In the DC Super Hero Girls (2019) episode "#AcceptNoSubstitute", one of the indignities Barbara suffers when her father James Gordon becomes a substitute teacher is that he shows the class a photograph of when she was a baby. Barbara tries to use her hacking skills to delete the photo, but inadvertently ends up displaying a home movie of James picking up baby Barbara and remarking that she just soiled her diaper.
• One episode of Doug has a subversion. Patti is at his house and Doug's mom is showing her photos while Doug is in another room, only able to hear the reactions. It turns out the photos aren't of him, but of his dog.
• In the Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends episode "Infernal Slumber", Mac is embarrassed when Eduardo finds and photographs one of Mac's baby pictures, which depicts him bathing in the sink with his rear end visible.
• In the Futurama episode "The Prisoner of Benda", we see Amy Wong's employee of the year photo from 2997. She was quite fat back then. It's also a Continuity Nod to "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles", where the preteen Amy is depicted as being pudgy.
  Amy: [to Farnsworth] Would you please take that down? It's making me hungry.
• Gravedale High: "Goodbye Gravedale" begins with Max Schneider's class watching home movies. Mr. Schneider gets embarrassed when he sees that a home movie of himself as a baby wandering from the camera with his bare behind visible somehow found its way into the projector.
• Near the beginning of the Gravity Falls episode "The Inconveniencing", Mabel embarrasses her brother Dipper in front of his crush Wendy by showing a picture of Dipper, aged five, in a lamb costume.
  Dipper: Now is not the time to talk about the Lamby Dance!
• Home Movies:
  • Brendon and his mom go to dinner at the Funny Foreigner kid's house to make up for Brendon's making fun of him. Everyone there is laughing it up at an old video Brendon's mom had sent to a contest that shows little Brendon peeing himself. It made the evening news.
  • In another episode, Brendon makes a "Behind the Music"-style documentary of Duane's band — including a standard naked-on-bearskin-rug baby picture of Duane, with the same cap-over-eyes sullen face.
• The House of Mouse episode "Max's Embarrassing Date" has Mickey introducing a cartoon and saying that Max loved it since he was "a tiny tot in diapers" and proceeds to show a baby picture of Max on a tricycle.
• Jimmy Two-Shoes features a variant in its first episode "Spew Tube", which centers on Jimmy, Beezy and Heloise finding an embarrassing old home movie of Lucius. Heloise, being the sadist she is, not only puts it up on Spew Tube, but makes sure it's shown at a rally for all of Miseryville to see.
• Happened a few times on KaBlam!:
  • In "Cramming Cartoons Since 1627", Henry's mom shows June and her father (and since they're on a show, EVERYONE) pictures of Henry in a Pilgrim costume for his elementary school Thanksgiving pageant. Not to be outdone, June's dad shows off home movies of baby June taking a bath.
  • In "Going the Extra Mile", when Ryan wins a contest to spend the day with Henry and June, he shows the viewers rare footage of the duo when they were little. June is shown in a diaper commercial, while Henry is shown getting kicked by a cow on America's Nuttiest Home Videos, which are embarrassing to them.
• Kim Possible:
  • Whilst clearing out Ron's garage, Kim finds a video labelled "Ron's Big Day", which Ron instantly snatches from her hands while saying that it's "nothing". At the end of the episode, we discover why after it's been switched with his monster movie — the tape is of a young Ron using the toilet.
  • Kim, on the other hand, has a fair few. Jim and Tim embarrass her while she's on a date by playing a video of her as a toddler playing in the bath, and she has a series of embarrassing school pictures that make her determined to have the perfect school photo.
• This is Truth in Television in Looney Tunes. An embarrassing baby photo became the basis for Tweety's character design.
• The Loud House and its spin-off, The Casagrandes:
  • In "Anti-Social", Lynn Sr. posts on SwiftyPic a picture of young Lori during her "awkward stage", in which she used to wear nerdy glasses and braces and had acne. Lincoln thinks old photos are harmless, until his father posts a picture of him as a baby from when he was potty training.
  • The Casagrandes episode "Señor Class" has Hector go to Ronnie Anne and Carl's school to live out the experience he didn't get to have due to him running the family's mercado as a kid. When he shows Ronnie Anne's class the Casagrande Family Tree, he humiliates Ronnie Anne with a photo of her as a baby wearing a dirty diaper.
  • In "Matters of the Kart", another Casagrandes episode, Irving has dinner at the Casagrandes' apartment after Carl saves him from Sergio's pigeon friends. During the dinner, Frida tries to show Irving some of Carl's baby pictures. Rather than the expected gag of showing baby Carl sitting on a potty or lying naked on a bear-skin rug, the photo Frida shows is of baby Carl having taken the diapers of the other babies at his daycare center. The reason Carl finds this embarrassing is because he doesn't want Irving to see his true colors.^note Namely, that Carl hired Sergio's pigeon friends to attack Irving so he could save him from them, and that Irving would see him as a caring, compassionate person deserving of the pizza go-kart he won in a contest as a result.
• The Mr. Peabody & Sherman Show has Mr. Peabody's foster parents show a slideshow of family pictures to an audience on Mr. Peabody's TV show. When Sherman zooms in to highlight the zits on his high school band picture, the normally unfettered Mr. Peabody has a breakdown.
• In the My Life as a Teenage Robot episode, "Tuckered Out", Jenny, Brad, and Sheldon show a bunch of old home movies of Tuck to his second grade class as revenge for how badly he treated them when he directed a movie about Jenny. These include a young Tuck being potty-trained, urinating on a Mall Santa out of fear, and the infamous "naked-baby-on-fur-rug" photo.
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • In the episode "Call of the Cutie", Cheerilee shows a picture of herself from around the time she first got her cutie mark, and the kids all laugh at her outdated '80s fashion.
      Cheerilee: Yes, I know, but honestly, that's how everypony was wearing their mane back then.
    • In "Ponyville Confidential", Apple Bloom tries to interview Granny Smith for a story for the school newspaper, but Granny Smith is more interested in going over old family albums, including a few embarrassing baby pictures of Apple Bloom.
    • In "The One Where Pinkie Pie Knows", Applejack thinks this of her own baby picture on her birth certificate.
    • In "Surf and/or Turf", Ocean Flow offers to show Twilight her children's baby pictures, much to the embarrassment of her son, Terramar.
  • My Little Pony: Make Your Mark: Subverted in "The Jinxie Games". Pipp thinks that Queen Haven is showing Alphabittle her embarrassing filly photos, when she's actually showing him cute pictures of their pet winged dog Cloudpuff.
• The Oh Yeah! Cartoons short "Baxter and Bananas: Monkey See, Monkey Don't" had Baxter's animate sock monkey Bananas manipulate Baxter into going along with his plan by threatening to show the guests Baxter's parents invited over a baby picture of Baxter lying on his belly naked.
• In the Pepper Ann episode "Impractical Jokes" as part of an escalating prank war between the kids, Nicky finds a baby picture of Milo naked on a bear-skin rug and puts it on the class projector.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • This gem. Doofenshmirtz will never live it down. It's also a bit of a Continuity Nod because he mentions the video was lost. In a previous episode, a lot of his junk was dumped out of his aircraft.
  • Also, the recurring photo that the OWCA use as his ID. "Yeah, that picture's gonna haunt me."
  • In "Does This Duckbill Make Me Look Fat?" Linda shows Jeremy a video of Candace as a baby in the bathtub, oblivious to the fact that Candace is right there watching this in Perry's body.
• The title characters of The Powerpuff Girls (1998) have a good laugh after viewing Mojo Jojo's baby photos.
• In the Parents Day episode of Recess, Spinelli's parents show the gang a picture of her as a baby naked with her butt sticking in the air.
• In the Rocko's Modern Life episode "An Elk For Heffer" Heffer casually asks Elkie if she would like to see some embarrassing pictures of himself as a child.
• The Sheep in the Big City episode "Daddy Shearest" has Private Public's father General Public humiliate his son by showing embarrassing childhood pictures to General Specific. We don't actually see any of the pictures, but one of them is described as depicting Private Public having spots on his butt.
• The Simpsons:
  • In the episode "Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song", Bart is watching a video of embarrassing things that have happened to the family in years gone past. Bart says that he wants to take it to school but Marge tells him that he wouldn't find it funny if people laughed at him. Bart says that would never happen... until he sees his younger self on the toilet.
  • In a later season, Bart and Lisa use an old camera to take a picture of a forest fire for a contest to see what will go on the cover of the new phone book. When Marge develops the roll of film, she finds an old picture of toddler Bart and Lisa sharing a toilet. That one wins the contest.
  • Double Subversion in "Barting Over", an even later episode. Lisa found a videotape which she thought was labeled "Bart Sad", but turned out to be "Bart's Ad". It was a commercial for a very dangerous cure for bad baby breath; he was the "before" baby. It was still enough for Nelson to mock him about. More than just being embarrassing, though, it showed Bart that he had earned a lot of money which Homer spent to cover up another photo, this one of him dropping Bart off a balcony.
  • A tie-in book called "The Simpsons' Family Album" did, indeed, feature a much younger Bart naked, butt-up on a bearskin rug. As the cover illustration.
• In The Spectacular Spider-Man episode "Growing Pains", Flash Thompson's mother has a framed photo of him as a toddler happily running around with no pants on, which Peter points out upon the revelation that he and Flash had been best friends in nursery school.
  Peter: Who do you think gave Eugene his nickname? It wasn't 'cause he ran fast.
  Flash: I WAS FOUR, OKAY?!
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • According to the episode "The Secret Box", an embarrassing snapshot of SpongeBob at the Christmas party can be found in Patrick's secret box.
  • When thinking of how to scare the Flying Dutchman while he's trapped inside his mind in the Halloween Episode "The Legend of Boo-Kini Bottom", SpongeBob notes that he really gets scared when his mother shows people his naked baby pictures, which gives him the idea to scare the Flying Dutchman by thinking up himself as a giant naked infant.
• At the end of The Superhero Squad Show episode "Mother of Doom", Doctor Doom's mother gets back at her son by posting embarrassing pictures of him on Maskbook, which are unseen by the audience.
• In an episode of Daria, Sandi continually tries to harass Quinn about her relationship to Daria, but Quinn, without confirming or denying it, not-so-subtly mentions that she has a picture of Sandi when she was in elementary school with huge braces, but has decided not to show the picture to anyone out of the goodness of her heart... or at least not yet. Sandi quickly backs off.
  • In "The Invitation" Daria mentions having a picture of Quinn in her "chubby stage." A tie-in book also shows an unflattering picture of her in her "awkward stage," which apparently only lasted about a week.
• In the Teacher's Pet episode "Being Mrs. Leadready", Leonard mentions that his mother once embarrassed him by showing the class his naked baby pictures.
• The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: The home movie variant is alluded to in the ending of the live-action portion of The Legend of Grimace Island, where the McDonaldland gang watch home movies of Grimace's family. Hamburglar laughs at a video of Grimace when he was a baby because of Baby Grimace wearing a diaper, with Birdie chiding Hamburglar for his mockery by bringing up that she recalls a certain home movie of Hamburglar running through the sprinklers (what's embarrassing about it isn't addressed, but it's likely because the younger Hamburglar is naked in the video).

Real Life

• There was one You've Been Framed video where a little boy having a bath is having an argument with his mother. The mother tells the boy that one day she will show this video to his girlfriend.
• Jack Coleman discussing the most embarrassing roles of his past (complete with a picture of his mulleted 80s haircut) on Television Without Pity's "The H.R.G. Blog"
• The Ellen DeGeneres show has a segment called "Bad Paid-for Photos", where viewers send in or showcase live their embarrassing old photographs. Most of these are studio or school photos and tend to be "bad" because of 80s hair, glasses, sweaters or a combination of a few. One of the staffers on the show was dressed up as a girl by his mother when he was a child because his mother really wanted a daughter. Squick.
• Colin Baker did a series of cheesy photos for... something in the Seventies. One of them became a mini-meme. Say hello to Seventies Porn Colin◊.
• The blog Awkward Family Photos revolves around this trope.

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