All of the photo printing options for digital photos are self-service. Whether you order prints online or use a self-service kiosk. You, as the customer have to decide what photos to send to print, which ones to keep on the device, or memory card/stick, and which ones can be deleted.
You can’t very well take your phone to a printer requesting to have all of your photos printed. When it was film/spools, that was how it was done. The only way to view photos was to print everything. Do that now, chances are, it would be a hefty bill at the printer as many people have gigabytes of photos stored on their devices and cloud storage services.
Smartphones have albums within their media gallery. By default, the majority of smart devices with cameras give you several albums. The main one is the camera roll.
Others include folders for screenshots, downloads, the DCIM (digital camera images) folder, and if you have media sharing apps such as Messenger, Whatsapp, and Instagram, your media gallery may have separate image folders for each of those.
When you know that you have a print project on the forecast, the printing process goes a lot smoother when the images you want to print are pre-organised into a separate folder; one that is dedicated to printing. If you need different sizes, create subfolders.
Why? Because otherwise, you will be spending a long time either at your computer selecting which files to upload and if you are going to use a self-service print kiosk, like the one we have in our Bedford print shop, you do not want to be spending so long at the kiosk that the power drains on your device. It could happen.
The fastest way to get your prints from a device to a printer is to have them organised and ready to send when you need them. It takes longer to choose the photos to print than it does to print them. Printing takes seconds. People tend to take much longer to make decisions.
When deciding which photos to print, factor in the size of the prints required. If you want different sizes for different photos, organise your folders by size.
Folders named with the print sizes will make it easier to batch print your photos at the correct sizes. Take for example a 25 slot multi-aperture frame requiring 25 square prints at a 4” x 4” size. If you have your images organised and edited already, rather than endlessly scrolling through your camera roll to find the photos that you want to be printed, simply open the 4x4 folder and tap select all.
That batch can be printed and put into its own envelope ready to slot into the frame. Your next batch print could be all of the photos at a 6” x 4” size to use in a photo book.
By taking the time beforehand to organise your photos into what you want to have printed at what sizes, you can better segregate your orders, get your prints batch uploaded, and be ready to start on your print project, be it framing, or sorting your photos into albums or photo books.
The added advantage of allocating the time before using the kiosk or uploading files online is that you will be less likely to order random photos just in case you want them later. Taking the time beforehand in choosing what to print helps ensure you get what you need to be printed at the right sizes and nothing more, so no unnecessary print fees.