Let me start off by saying, you should absolutely print your photos. I get told time and time again from clients that they just “didn’t get around to it”, but they will someday. Or, they get shared on Facebook (which stays visible for about all of a 24 hour period) and nothing ever happens with them after that. It makes me sad to see people take photos just to get a few likes and comments, ultimately for their memories to just get scrolled past and forgotten in the end, by everyone, including themselves. Sure, Time Hop is great, it does remind you of some really good memories you may otherwise have forgotten, but what if you could get them out, sort through them and reminisce about the “good times” while holding those moments in your hand instead? Oh wait, you can! It is called a print….and here are a few reasons why you should always print your photos instead of letting them just live on a computer.

1) Technology Fails. This is the big one! File corruption and hard drive failure are real. Coming from someone who knows technology well, takes excellent care and caution when saving files, and deals with literally thousands upon thousands of digital photographs every month, I can tell you, I have had several issues over the years concerning technology failure and loss of files for this reason. It is just a matter of when, not if. And it isn’t anyone’s fault. No matter how much you baby that external hard drive, it is built from moving parts. When one of them “makes a wrong move”, the drive deteriorates over time until you are left with nothing, and you probably won’t ever even know it is happening until it is too late to save it. While I always maintain a backup (or two), and stress to all of you to do the same, a print isn’t just going to disappear like a digital image can.

2) Technology changes. I’ve been doing this for 15 years. When I started out, it was before digital photography was a real thing, and everyone ordered prints. Fast forward a couple years to when digital became a thing….and we started providing images on a CD to clients. Then, fast forward a few more. Computers were no longer all coming with a CD drive, and I had clients coming back and requesting images because they couldn’t get them off a CD anymore. Everything was now about flash drives/USB technology instead. Technology changed, and people no longer had access to their images (think along the lines of VHS, DVD, then Blu-Ray, and now digital movies you buy through apps - it is the exact same thing where old technology becomes useless). I never had one client come back to me for having issues with their prints not being able to be used anymore, but I can’t say the same about digital images.

3) Technology “goes missing”. I hear about this one the most…..”I can’t find my USB,” “I thought I saved them, but I can’t find them on my computer,” “we moved and I know that USB is somewhere, but I can’t find it,” “I know I made a backup, but I can’t find it either!”. I hear a lot of this with people coming back and requesting for me to lookup their images for them again. Sometimes that is an easy, no problem task for me. Sometimes I encounter Reason #1 and Reason #2. And then there is the fact that I do deal with thousands upon thousands of images on a monthly basis, so that means LOTS and LOTS of stored images for me to sort through. While I do think of myself as extremely organized when it comes to data storage, it is still a time consuming task to dig up old hard drives, get them set up, plugged back in, and gone through (and this also jumbling around inevitably can cause #1, too). And the average person is not going to be as organized or careful about saving images as I am. Prints tend to be a bit more organized….stored in a special box altogether, not in a folder here or maybe there, among 100 other folders that look the exact same.

4) Technology gets erased. Oops, I didn’t mean to delete that. But your hard drive doesn’t care. People accidentally write over info, delete folders, or reformat drives without knowingly doing so all the time. A lot of people don’t know about data recovery (that is a topic for a different day though), and it is very expensive, and not a guarantee. This tends to be a big issue for people who save everything to a phone or leave photos on their camera card in particular. Your memories can be gone in an instant just because of an “accident”. Prints tend to not just disappear, maybe get misplaced, but not disappear.

5) Technology can be hard to organize. I don’t know that I even need to explain this one. We will leave it at that.

And I know some of you are thinking to yourselves right now, “ But, I just save everything to the Cloud and its on my social media, too”. And that is a great step. But how often do you log in? What are the chances you’ll get locked out by forgetting a password some day? And data is still very easy to delete, yes, even from The Cloud. What happens when you go over your allowed storage space and get in a hurry deleting things - there is an oops moment waiting to happen there. And the organization issue still exists. Oh, and your images saved on social media….not only are they downsized so that you can’t print from them if you ever want to (and you should!), but just look at how many people are currently being banned and blocked. Or entire platforms removed from the internet. You can’t trust what you can’t hold in your hand.

I hope this has helped convince you that prints are still king. Even if you just print out a 4x6, that is only about a $.20 investment, and you’ll always have that memory to share. Or perhaps you could make a yearly photo book - that will be pretty cool when you’re 80 and thinking about the “good ‘ole days”. Or think about the moment when your little girls asks you about the day you and Daddy got married, and you can hand her a photo book to look through with you.

People, I’m going to say it one more time. Print your photos. Next time, I’ll talk to you about where to print and give you tips on making printing as easy as possible. So, come back again later this week for Part 2.