My problem is that I have been left in the proverbial cyber dust and don’t even know where to start or how! I know I should. Do any of you actually print photographs nowadays? I know I’m old, but I love our photo albums. I hate that I’ve slacked off here due to everything being digital.
Gee, a photographer says that we should pay for print photos? As someone who used to work for photographers and a photography company myself, I promise there is absolutely no conflict of interest there 
I am part of the digital generation. I have had digital cameras since… well, basically since I can remember. I only vaguely remember the pre-digital age, and many moves later, we have very few of those photographs that are still in good shape and not lost.
But do I still have a TON of photographs from 2006? Absolutely. Many of them are on a cloud, on facebook (yes, from 2006), and so on.
I have almost zero pictures printed from my wedding last year. I have zero interest in ever printing them. They’re on a google drive.
Call me old fashioned but I still like hard copies of photos and I still make photo albums. I do some albums online now through services like Snapfish and I still print out some photos maybe twice a year and put them in an album. I keep thinking that formats and sites will keep changing as technology improves so I think that having at least some hard copies is a nice thing. My kids will probably just toss them all one day, but I enjoy having the albums around. (I do know that my brother has everything digital – he looks at me like I"m crazy if I give him an actual photo)
There’s nothing like photo albums passed from generation to generation. Digital smidgital. I’m still putting actual photographs into actual photo albums. And my kids love to look through them now - and will in the future.
With enough backups, digital is easy to keep if you just bother to migrate them from platform to platform. I have digital images from ~15 years ago that have moved in OS terms from Windows 98 to Windows ME to Windows 2000 to Windows XP to Mac OS X version 5, then 6, then 7, then 8, then 9, then 10 (haven’t upgraded that computer the El Capitan); and in hardware terms from a PC desktop to a PC laptop to another PC laptop to another PC laptop to a Mac laptop to another Mac laptop to a Mac desktop; and in other hardware terms there’ve been various platter and optical and flash drives and such all in there, too.
And that’s only the primary location of them—it doesn’t include the onsite and offsite backups.
Sorry, but I call shenanigans. Like @romanigypsyeyes said, there’s a bit of a conflict of interest going on in the linked article’s claims.
Sorry, I don’t see the value in print photos. I just don’t. Maybe it’s because photos didn’t survive much in my family due to moves and poverty.
You’re kidding yourself if you think the average print photo is safer than digital.
I’m a historian. I love photos of my historical subjects but you know where I find most of them? Online or in digital form because that’s how they’re best preserved.
True story. I’m the project manager for a massive project where we’ve digitized and scraped data from over 20,000 patient records. These records have been used to prove how massive California’s state eugenics program was and will likely eventually form the basis of reparations for eugenics victims and their families.
Why do I bring this up? My advisor found these records on film about 10 years ago just hiding on unmarked reels in a filing cabinet. She painstakingly converted well over 100000 individual images into jpeg form and gave the film back to California who promptly lost these nearly 100 year old records. The only surviving records of the people who were sterilized by the state against their will now exist on a protected database and two protected external hard drives that are kept under lock and key.
Photos are fragile and easily lost and with them are lost countless memories and stories. As a historian, if it were up to me, every single photograph and document ever would be scanned and stored in a cloud system. This applies to my own history, my family’s history, and broader historical stories.
Sure, continue to print pictures by all means. But to say they’re going to be gone in 10 years is absolutely ridiculous and nothing more than a long advertisement for this photographer.
I have boxes and albums of photos from when my children were born and before. My son is 36. We pull albums out every once in a while. My parents have albums from when I was a baby. I’m 60. Have survived the countless moves we made over the years and the different formats that came. Have complete albums of my parents’ wedding and mine. They’ve been married 60 years. We’ve only been married 38.
It would be hard for me to find a picture of my 3 yr old grandson on the day he was born. Sure they were taken, but digitally and stored who knows where by my son. Sent by snapchat and screen shot on my phone but I got a new phone and now it’s gone. There might be a few on Facebook of his first year but I’d have to remember on whose page and search through them all. There are some on some cloud somewhere but hard to pull out and show grandma when she comes over.
We copied some old VHS tapes to DVD a few years ago so we could watch old home movies including some from when I was a child but we no longer own a DVD player since everything we watch is online. Meanwhile, my parents still have the reel of that movie and we can make another copy.
Give me hard copies any day.
Yes…hard copies! We got our first digital camera in 2004. I categorize it all on the PC by year, etc. they are easy to find. Then I make hard copies of my favorites and put them in albums by year.
I love to look at them, so do my kids. It’s fun to get one or two out albums out and sit together on the sofa.
I can see why people don’t do it. However, during my try at retirement in the fall…haha…I sifted through thousands of pictures and categorized, etc. all them . I got all my college pictures and put them in one album. DH and I met as freshman. The pics filled one full 400 page album. As DS one was looking at it, he said he feels sad because at this point he’ll never have anything like that to look at, too many pics to organize on his phone…never downloaded to a PC. Nor at this point will he do it.
I enjoy it anyway. 3 of us can sit around on the sofa and laugh…not so comfy and easy to congregate around a computer screen.
I do not miss trying to store the physical pictures. I take a lot of photos and I am so glad they are digital. I do make a Shutterfly book every year of photos of my grandson but that takes up a tiny bit of room on a shelf as compared to the old photo albums. I only print out one or two photos a year. As for wedding photos, mine are in a book (32 years old) and I can probably count on one hand how many times I have looked at them. I don’t even plan to hire a professional photographer for my daughter’s wedding.
I no longer print photos.
Ths is funny. I have been on an oddessy to go in the opposite direction - digitalizing my hard copies of old photos.
I have 50+ (!) photo albums of photos going back to my parents childhoods. The oldest photos are from 1920. I am up to 1988 in digitalizing them. I have NO intention of ditching the originals, but I feel better knowing that there are “safe” copies that are accessable by anyone in the family, and from any computer, laptop or smart phone.
The first time I attempted to digitalize them I put them on an external hard drive, but that was cumbersome and involved the hard drive plugged into a lap top and a physical scanner plugged into the laptop, and the process was agonizingly slow in terms of scanning tagging and organizing the photos. I gave up.
I have recently taken up the task again. It has become much more enjoyable since several sites now exist that allow storage, organization into albums and tagging/ writing notes on each photo. I transferred the hard drive photos, and am working my way through the rest of the albums. Some photos that are in terrible shape look much better in digitalized form, and some that were “nothing” at the time have small details or subjects that have more meaning with the passage of time.
I’m using “Heirloom”, but there are other excellent sites.
And all of my already digital photos taken in the last few years are stored on Google Photos. I am closing the gap bit by bit.
I haven’t printed many photos in the last 6 years.
I do print photo books, but only selectively.
Nope. Even when there was no such thing as digital a lot of the time we didn’t even get all the rolls we took developed because we were slacker parents.
I have a huge drawer filled with pictures still in the paper thingy they came home with from being developed.
I do have online photo storage but haven’t uploaded to that in years and I have albums on Facebook but most everything now is on our phones/iPads and so somewhere in a cloud too ( I think)
Before my wife’s funeral I began compiling some of her old photos and realized how many there were. So I bought a photo album and put her favorite picture in the slot on the cover. At the calling hours everyone looked through the photos and I was surprised by some of their comments. It’s a good way to show a loved one’s life story without giving speeches. I am aware that a Powerpoint or a slide show can do this too.
Now I’m off to Heirloom, Snapfish, Shutterfly, and the Cloud to get all of our photos digitized and then put in albums thanks to some of your tips.
Also: We lost a bunch of photos (and their negatives!) due to water damage a while back. Fires, of course, destroy print photos. Natural disasters can hit at any time.
Anyone who thinks print photos are safer and more permanent than digital ones is fooling themselves. Everything is temporary. (Memento mori and all that, I suppose.)
I obviously struck a digital nerve, LOL. I didn’t say it but my thought is to have both perhaps. I send my phone pics to cloud storage as well as to Photobucket. And yes, I agree with digitalizing existing hard copy photos as well. I can’t help it, I still appreciate hard copy photographs but I do realize they are quickly dying, I haven’t made any in years. It just always seems a bit awkward to me to gather around a cell phone to see pics, but I think I also have crossed that line and doubt I will go to the trouble to make hard copies.
@VaBluebird: I am finally moving things over to digital, though I am not happy about it. Taking the comment of dfbdfb into consideration, I may move more quickly very soon.
I ordered the traditional suite of senior pictures for my graduating high schooler a few years ago, and he took not a single one of the wallet sized photos to school to give to anyone. When I asked him why he wasn’t taking them in before he and his classmates scatter to different parts of the globe, he told me, “We don’t do that. I just put it on my Facebook page.”
Ho-hum. Silly me.
I print out the really good photos and put them in a frame. I have framed pics scattered throughout my houses. Not on the walls, but on side tables and interspersed between books in bookshelves. I have one cabinet full of old photos that I have to sort through. Thinking I might do one album for each child spanning infancy through 21.
Too many books to do the modern day interspersing on the bookshelf, but I do like that look.
I guess I am kinda liking and not liking this thread. (I have work to do…)
The only set of pics I didn’t make hard copies of were a trip to CA a couple years ago. I spent hours making a music DVD to 400+ photos as an Xmas surprise for the family. We love it and watch it together from time to time. I didn’t have the energy to make hard prints, edit them, etc.
I have all of my negatives scanned and my dad has scanned all of his slides, since he always used a slide camera. Between the two of us, most of my mother’s pictures have been scanned and I have done many of my mother-in-laws. When we need photos for an event (wedding, birthday party, funeral) I am the go to person since I have them all together and organized by year.
The one thing I haven’t tried to do is label them all. Is there a service I could upload them all to and add labels using the computer instead of a phone? I type much fast on the computer and it is easier to see the photos on a larger screen.