Printing a photo that you can hold in your hand makes your precious memories all the more meaningful. Physical prints are a profound way to remember, to look back on, and to cherish. Don't let your photos stay stuck on Instagram or your phone forever!
Print them, share them, and love them!
It is worth remembering that printed photographs won’t suddenly go obsolete because the picture format is no longer supported or the social media platform they are hosted on suddenly shuts down. Over long periods of time, the only way to ensure your photos remain accessible and if you’re lucky, passed down the generations is to get them printed.
It’s important to make time to sort through, organise and save your photographs, both printed and digital. This may seem tedious and tiresome at first, but not if you think about just how precious our photographs are, and just how easily they can be lost, it is worth it to keep them and your memories safe. It takes time to do this and is best accomplished when you keep up on it, like anything you value.
Photographs measure the past, capture our present, and preserve memories for the future. But they can’t do any of that if we lose them or don’t know what they’re showing us. Which in itself is an argument for keeping printed photographs.
Print the digitals and digitalise your most precious prints, as a professional photographer I try to be safeguarded by scanning, digitising, and backing up.
So, let’s get saving!
Saving different types of photographs
Physical prints
Printed photographs seem to be becoming rarer as we rely more and more on our phones, digital cameras, and computers to snap pics and view them. But how often do we go back and look through all those digital photographs? We are far more likely to enjoy them when they’re printed out and in albums, photobooks or best of all, framed and on your wall!
Printing doesn’t have to be expensive
You can now walk into high street stores with just a selection of your favourite photos on your phone and hand them over or upload just the photos you want to be printed to an online print lab, confident in the knowledge that the prints you get back will be keepers. This selective approach means you no longer have to waste money on printing photos that end up in a shoebox in the cupboard, never to see the light of day.
On the flip side, printing can be an expensive undertaking. If you choose to print on fine art paper or choose to buy a professional printer and print at home then you are going to make a more considerable investment but, the key word here is “choose”. You can choose to spend more money but with so many options at either end of the price spectrum, you just don’t have to.
Getting started
When it comes to printed photographs, your first task is to get them organised and labelled (not just left in a box under a bed!). Figuring out who everyone is and where they’re at in the pics will take some time, and will probably require some phone calls to friends and family. Then digitise them by scanning them. Using a flatbed scanner, and scan at the highest resolution you possibly can! It is indeed tedious and time-consuming, but you’ll feel so much better once it’s done. You can either do it yourself or take them to a company to do it for you. Finally, find a way to keep the physical photos safe. This can be in matching photo albums or boxes, or even a photo book created online and printed (www.photobox.co.uk often has excellent offers). Try to keep prints somewhere cool and where they won’t be exposed to direct sunlight. Also, as you’re working with them, be sure your hands are clean and you’re only touching the edges. For super special, irreplaceable photos, like Grandma and Grandpa’s original wedding photos, you might even want to wear a pair of white cotton gloves.
As for displaying your favourite prints, if a frame simply sitting on a shelf sounds too tame, the internet is full of fun, creative ideas of what to do with your photographs, from collages and canvas wall art to photo walls to hanging pictures from branches mounted over the sofa.
Make a drink, get comfy, and spend some time finding what appeals to your style.
Digital photographs
There are a lot of options when it comes to organising and saving your digital photos from your phone or camera (and including all those printed pics you scanned). You can use an external hard drive, USB drives, memory cards or online cloud storage such as Google, apple or knowhowcloud. You can also use one or more of the many online storage options available: Photobox, Google Photos, Dropbox, SmugMug, Amazon Photo (free for Prime members), to name just a few. It really all comes down to how many photos you’re saving and what will work best for you long term.
Oh, you’ve already got them organised and saved? Great. Now it’s time to save them again!
Sometimes we mistakenly think that digital photos are safer than printed pics. They can’t be burnt or damaged by flooding or physically lost. But in their own ways, digital photographs are even more fragile than printed ones! They can be lost...to hard drive failure, virus infection, stolen computers, lost USB drives, scratched CDs and DVDs, or even just an accidental click of the mouse that results in a permanent deletion! As professional photographers already know, not only do you have to save and back-up your photographs, but you have to back-up your back-up! A good rule of thumb is to have digital photos saved in a few different spots. Never keep them just on your computer, which could crash at anytime, but also save them to an external hard drive or USB drive, and back them up to an online storage, like the Cloud or those mentioned in the above section.
Sharing as a part of saving
Another part of saving your photos is sharing them. Part of the magic of photographs and their legacy is sharing. As the weather cools and we begin to stay indoors more, a project like putting together a photo album or scrapbook (of all the photos scanned and digitally saved somewhere else!) can be a great way to pass the evenings. If family and friends are far away, you’ll feel as if you spent time with them as you look at their smiling faces.
Create photo books from one of the many online services such as Photobox, Blurb, and Shutterfly, and give them as gifts. Should disaster strike and for some reason you do lose precious photos, friends and family with their own copies will gladly help you recreate your photo collection.
Sharing photographs is a gift that can give back when you need it most!
A checklist to get you started and keep you going
- Sort through and organise printed photos
- Contact family and friends to identify who are in the photographs and label
- Dispose of blurry, poor-quality photos and unwanted negatives
- Find a storage method that works for your albums and boxes are great!
- Frame and display photos you love
- Scan and save printed photographs digitally
- Organise your digital photos into albums, years, events, or whatever makes sense to you
- Back up digital photos (in two spots!)
- Delete unwanted digital photos on your phone and computer
- Keep up on deletions as you take photos
- Put a monthly reminder to download and backup photos off your phone (don’t wait until next September!) or have your device automatically backup where possible
Don’t feel daunted. Take it one step at a time. Enjoy the process and enjoy time with your memories.
Conclusion
What we do with our digital photos will continue to evolve and who knows what the next best thing will be but one thing we know for certain is that we will all continue to view most of our photos on a screen, in many cases taking only seconds to process the image before we skip to the next.
It doesn’t have to be this way for all of our photos. For those that evoke a special kind of emotion, be it fond memories, loved ones or simply a picture you are proud to have taken, bring those select few to life by making a physical print and displaying it in your home or a book on your shelf rather than being stored and forgotten on your phone or computer lost among the many thousands of other photos you probably have there.
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