This may be a naive question, but since I don't use social media at all (save for a pretty dormant linked-in account) I really don't see the use of downloading

This may be a naive question, but since I don't use social media at all (save for a pretty dormant linked-in account) I really don't see the use of downloading your photos from a picture sharing site. Is it because of the contacts you have and would that data be in any usable format? While I can see the appeal of a photo sharing site to share pictures I would have to be incredibly reckless or stupid to use such a site for archival purposes (let alone that I certainly wouldn't trust them not to wreck my pictures with some heavy handed compression or scaling). Is it just me who cares about my original images enough to archive them redundantly on a variety of storage media? And if that's not so, why would I ever care to be able to retrieve my pictures from such a site?