Printed Photographs are Gifts

“An image in hand can touch your heart more deeply than an image on a computer screen. Printed photographs are gifts.” ~Meredith Wynn

I am a strong advocate for getting photographs PRINTED and not leaving them to languish (or eventually disappear) on hard drives, CDs, or memory cards. How long will it be before these storage mediums go the way of the floppy disk and becomes obsolete? Or your hard drive crashes? Or you lose your phone? How many precious pictures and memories will be lost?

Thankfully, I’m not alone in this but I’m aware that most people these days do not get their photos printed out. Here’s a quote from someone else who feels strongly about getting photographs printed, “Printing your images is something everyone should do. Don’t rely on your computer to save them. By printing your images it is just another way to back up your images. I was putting them in a photo box so why not take a few extra minutes to display them for friends and family to flip through.” Courtney at Click it Up a Notch.

Wendy Grant, an incredibly talented photographer in the UK has also written about the importance of printed photos as a family heirloom. [She is now retired and no longer has an active website with that article.]

TIP: Your home snapshots are safest when printed out; don’t leave them on discs, your computer hard drive, or your phone! Get them printed and, even if they are in photo boxes, you will still have them to pass down to your children. I recommend taking them to a professional photo lab for the best quality and it’s much more economical than printing your own.

By putting your printed photos in a scrapbook or album you document a period of time or event in yours and your family’s life that lasts for decades.  Decades beyond your life they become family heirlooms to be handed down from one generation to the next. Children especially love looking through old photos, particularly when seeing themselves. I still love pulling out my parents’ wedding album, my mom’s photo albums, even my own wedding album and flipping through the pages and memories. If we don’t get our pictures printed and put into albums (or photo boxes), what will happen if the hard drive crashes? What will happen if the disks are corrupted or damaged? What will happen if admin at Facebook ‘accidently’ lose your photos (since they’re already selling some of them for their own profit)? What will our children and grandchildren have to hold in their hands, look through, and enjoy? Sure we can still watch the images on phone screens but nothing beats having those images in a physical album or photo book.

If you’re not interested in scrapbooking or creating an album, a great alternative is making a book from your digital images. There are so many different companies now that offer a really nice quality book. I love the ones I’ve had made for our family by Apple. [Update: Apple no longer has this option.] A lot of people are also using Blurb and Shutterfly for getting books made with their photographs. It’s so easy to do because the work is done for you — you simply insert the photos into your choice of template and it comes out beautifully professional. These books also make fantastic gifts for parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, or as Father’s Day or Mother’s Day gifts too.

IDEAS for Creating Books from your Digital Images:

• Year in Review
• Vacations & Family gatherings
• Family Reunion
• Baby’s First Year // Graduation
• Birthdays or Anniversary celebrations
• Day in the Life (a sort of time capsule)

If you clicked on the time capsule link, you will have ‘met’ Xanthe Berkeley and I love what she wrote on her blog about creating her time capsules, “Hanging out with a family, getting to know them, being part of their day. Noticing the little things… the things that I imagine will be important to recall in years to come. Take photographs, not just fancy “hey everyone, look at me” portraits but the ordinary moments, where you’re focused on something else… where you almost don’t notice me.”  Exactly, photographing the ordinary moments, not the ubiquitous posed photos, and then doing something with them so you and your family can look back on them in years to come.

Yes, even printed photographs can be destroyed but a physical print, even if faded or torn, is still better than images vanished because of technological glitches.

“The palest ink is better than the best memory.” ~Chinese proverb

In this age of DIY what better gift to give yourself, your family, and future generations than the gift of memories? I hope you will reconsider all those images that are sitting on your hard drive, on disks, or phone. Little by little, why not start getting them printed out and placed into albums (or photo books). There’s nothing like the real thing. Give it a try!

Further Reading on This Important Topic:

What Can I Do with all My Snapshots?