Printing photos is easy to do. There is a cost to consider though, particularly with colour prints because they are more expensive. That is still the case with home printing. Even for monotone prints.
Asides from the cost factor, before hitting that ‘send to print’ button either on your phone, at a photo printing kiosk, or ordering from any of the cloud storage providers, you ought to consider if the photos that you have curated are worth printing.
Will they be used or even be meaningful or have the impact that you hope they will?
Below are a few pointers to help you decide whether a photo is worth printing or if it is best left to the cloud for digital viewing.
Ask yourself these questions before printing for the purpose of a family photo album.
What will your offspring feel?
It is one thing to want to showcase all your kids, your grandkids and their pets in a family album viewed on a digital screen. The ones that may not pique someone’s interest, swipe and it’s gone. The same cannot be done with a tangible print without flipping and even that takes longer than a finger swipe.
A printed photo has more oomph to it than a picture made of pixels displayed on a digital screen.
Consider this: Do you think your future family generation(s) will be huddled around a digital screen oohing and awing at what is likely to be photos of their family tree? Probably not. In a photo album though, that is more likely.
Will it be inspirational?
Nobody needs a written Will to leave a legacy. Your life can inspire a legacy just through photos alone. A Grandkid seeing photos of their Grandad as a Postman lets them know that they come from a working-class background, regardless of if they have more success or not. They will know (or at least be reminded) that there are no luxuries to be had without some hard graft.
The same goes for the lorry drivers in the family, the shop clerks, and of course, the certificates of the higher achievers. Not high achievers per se, but anyone in the family who has done others proud. The first to go to college, receive an award, start a charity, run a marathon etc. It doesn’t really matter what the achievement is, so long as the memory is preserved, it can be inspirational to anyone in a family.
Photos of the family with their certificates showing their merits are a preserved memory that can leave a motivational legacy.
Does the photo need to be explained?
When you flick through a digital photo album, it is not like you can turn the photo over to see a message that was written on the back of it, like the date it was taken, who was in the photo and where it was taken. Those are things you may want to add.
When you are printing photos to display in a photo album, or to print and frame for display on your wall, messages can be written on the reverse, or a note card slipped into a frame to put a description of the photo in the photo. You might even include a plaque within a frame.
You can do the same with a tangible printed photo either stored in an album or a frame, but it is difficult to do the same with a digital photo without having specialised knowledge of web markup languages; mainly HTML formatting, which is used to display text alongside images on websites. To date, there aren’t any digital photo frames that can display the metadata that a photo is marked up with.
If you want to include a description or a message with a photo, you must have it printed and preferably (for preservation) with archival inks and on archival quality paper for it to last at least one generation.
Archiving is the real reason to print and frame photos or store them in an archival photo book that is offline rather than stored on the server of any company located somewhere in the world.
Print your most precious photos, store them in an archival photo album, and then they will be preserved for generations to come.