How many occasions have you looked at family photos from your past holiday, birthday or important events in your life? How many photos do you take each day? What happens to these photos later? Do you ever come back to them? Do you have them in print form or have they been lost in the depths of a memory card/disk? Have you ever wondered whether or not it’s still worth printing your photos?
In today’s blog, I would like to remind you of this often, forgotten form of connecting with photography, printed photographs. In the past, our shelves were buckling under the weight of numerous photo albums, and today we have the entire photo gallery in digital form. That being said, we have moved with the times and technology as expected, however I believe that we should also take care of the art of printing photos too
The Era of Smartphones in family photos
We live in an era when smartphones and other image capturing devices and gadgets dominate. Currently, we all take hundreds and even thousands of photos every year, which end up in the form of data files on our computers, external drives or in virtual clouds. Devices, even the best ones, can be unreliable at times, as we have all experienced. We all regularly upgrade our smart phone’s when the latest device is released and generally this is for the improvements of the camera, that being said we all know that computer hard drives can malfunction and leave you in trouble losing your memories stored there.
We view our handy work mainly on the display of a monitor or tablet. Eventually, a large part of our daily life has moved into the virtual world. It is simple and convenient – just a few clicks and all our friends on social media platforms can see our vacation photos and our daily lives. We also don’t take the time to always look through the endless folders we have stored to find a specific photo. We forget about so many photos very quickly. Thus, our memories, the joy of the moment, the places we have visited, the people we shared our time with, and the small details of our lives are missing from our memory.
With the vast majority of people who take family photos using their phone and loading the images to social media, none of us sit for hours and browse the posts from a few years ago or look into all the folders stored in our computer’s hard drive. As a society, we have become impatient and busy and who has enough free time to do it right. But there are many people who, as a result of a failure or a memory error not backing up correctly, have lost all their family photos, the entire long history from a computer hard drive, phone or from the cloud. Some life changing events can be erased forever.
It is easy to immerse yourself in the digital world and forget about the pleasure and nostalgia of a printed family photos.
The Era of analogue photography
In the era of analogue photography, developing prints was the done thing. It was another step that had to be taken to get the finished product for our viewing pleasure. The photo was something tangible, a certain stamp of time on paper, a physical reflection of your memory.
A photograph, which you can hold in your hand, causes a completely different experience and emotion than when it’s displayed on a screen. It’s authentic, has its shape and smell, and isn’t dependent on any technological device to view said picture. The laptop/tablet may break down, the phone may run out of power, or a backup may have failed, and the printed family photos will still be there to tell its story.
Remember those moments when you looked at a family album? Maybe you looked at them yourself, or maybe together with your parents/friends etc. you’ll have heard different stories behind specific photos. Perhaps there were black and white pictures of older relatives. Or some of the photos had handwritten dedications, usually on the reverse side of the photo, which made them even more unusual and triggered a memory of times gone by. You can remember how much emotion such albums evoked and isn’t it worth returning to these moments that sparked so much joy and happiness?
So, instead of creating digital slides, why not decide to print your photos and create an album. Yes, it will cost a little more and involve spending some time and effort, but the final result will surely satisfy you and your loved ones and be something that leaves a lasting effect for many years to come.
A traditional photo album is not only a family memento. It’s a real time machine! If we begin the habit of printing systematically, your family’s story and yours will be arranged chronologically in the album. You can open it at any time and relive those precious pieces of time in your hands.
My suggestion to you, is to print and develop family photos of everyday life. You don’t have to be a pro photographer to capture life with your smartphones, but don’t leave them there, in the digital world.
Top Tips for printing family photos
- In the photographs you can hold our best memories and nice moments.
- Printed photos evoke completely different emotions. They often take on completely different meanings when we put them together. Sometimes one photo says nothing – three photos grouped together can tell a fascinating story
- Printed photos are eternal, they can last for many years. To destroy photos, you have to tear them, burn them, throw them away. This is definitely more difficult than deleting a digital file with one click.
- The world is changing, technology is evolving, and yet paper photography continues. We all remember VHS & BETA video tapes, floppy disks & CDs. In current computer’s it’s not possible to use them. Can you think how many interesting movies and photos and memories have been lost? The same fate may befall our present data! And yet wouldn’t it be nice for future generations to have the opportunity to see what their relatives looked like during their childhood years.
- Photographs and your albums are an opportunity to remember and pass on family stories to future generations, I loved family gatherings with pictures! At the time, my grandmother would take a box with various treasures out of the wardrobe an, sitting at the table with the whole family, we would look at old family photos. Some of them were almost a hundred years old, which is fascinating.This wonderful tradition continues with my children. Every year, I visit my grandparents’ house and I look at the old albums, remember and tell them all about our ancestors and thanks to printing, we remember and keep our best memories.
Printing is now simple and cheap!
There are many places where you can print photos for free, paying only for the postage. It’s one way to encourage you to print pictures. One of the best options for printing your images is an application called: FREEPRINTS (https://www.freeprintsapp.co.uk) where you can print up to 40 photos a month for free. It’s simple, choose the images on your device, pay the shipping fee and in a few days the courier will deliver them to your home.
Print your memories to make them happy not only for you, but for your whole family and future generations to come.
I hope this has been useful and helpful to encourage you to print your memories!
