Innocent photos of children, originally posted on social media sites, account for up to half the material found on some paedophile image-sharing sites.

That is according to Australia's new Children's eSafety Commissioner, who warned people about sharing photos of their children on Facebook and similar applications.

"Many users clearly identify that they have obtained the content through trawling social media accounts," Alastair MacGibbon said.

He adds that images - while not be considered explicit in themselves - can be accompanied by explicit comments.

"Families - very innocently - maintain blogs where they catalogue every aspect of their children's lives, with no security against these obsessive efforts to obtain content," he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

"Within 10 days of being uploaded, the content had been viewed 1.7 million times and comments had been posted that explicitly sexualised the material," he added.

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Pat McKenna from childwatch.ie says having location services enabled can be dangerous.

"Let's say (a mother) takes a photograph of her children and she uploads it to Instagram - let's say, as a lot of people do, she would have location services switched on on her phone" he said.

"On her Instagram account she's got lots more photos form her home, from her child's school - first days of school - and so on".

"If all of that stuff is geo-located then anybody who goes to her account is able to pick out on a map where her children's school is; from a predatory point of view that is enormously risky".

He told Newstalk Breakfast attempts to get images taken down are not straight forward.