“Print your most important photos they are worth the time and the effort”
Remember the days of snapping photos, printing them out and filling photo albums? There was nothing like the feeling of dropping off a roll of film at the store to be developed and eagerly waiting for them to come back to see if you got that awesome picture of Joey dancing on the tables at a party or Betty enjoying a quiet day at the beach. Dating myself? That’s OK, I don’t mind sounding like a relic when it comes to photos.
Nowadays printing photos tends to escape most people’s priority list and some may think “well I’ve got all my pictures on my phone, why do I need to print them?” I have even fallen victim to no printing for at least a year or more. A few weeks ago, I received an email from one of the services that I use to store photos with a promotion to print 250 prints for free. FREE is key. Although there were thousands of photos at my disposal that I have been storing since the beginning of time, or at least the beginning of online photo storage when Ofoto was in the game, I had a tough time selecting 250 photos to print before the free promotion expired.
Whether it was the free offer that made the idea of printing so interesting or the fact that a big picture taking event, my Son’s Prom, had just happened, getting the email was kismet. One of the biggest obstacles to printing these days is having the time to peruse photos and choose which ones are print-worthy. Recent Keypoint Intelligence surveys tells us the lack of time to go through all their photos and decide what to print is one of the top three reasons people don’t print more often. Free time doesn’t make itself available when we are busy running about our daily lives, so sometimes we just need to find the time.
Although printing, even ordering free prints, costs time and money (shipping isn’t free ya know), the dividends of reliving your life stories in printed photos is priceless. A person doesn’t need to own a digital camera to print. If all you use for photography is your smartphone, there are many apps and retail store resources that make it easy to print. Even those “reduced quality” Facebook photos may be worth printing since the quality is usually just fine for a 4” x 6” (or smaller) print.
Although time is a precious commodity, so are our memories. Each group of printed photos was like a piece of the memories coming back to life. Putting the prints into a photo album, handwriting location details and quotes or just keeping track of names is all a way to keep memories alive. Not only that but when storage media like CD/DVD becomes unreadable, or something happens to that smartphone (bite your tongue) you won’t be able to get those photos back. Trusty, reliable photo prints are not disaster-proof, but they won’t disappear and will remain viable for decades to come to be enjoyed by future generations that may not even remember who the person was that printed them. Printing your most important photos they are worth the time and the effort.
Contact Keypoint Intelligence – InfoTrends with question or to learn more about our ongoing research about consumer and professional imaging trends and behaviors.