This is something I’ve grown more and more passionate about in the past couple of years. I offer digitals to customers because that is what they are wanting and what they ask for, but you really need to ask yourself what happens with those files. After having lost more than a few photos in my day and experimenting with numerous methods of backing up files, at the end of the day the chances of your loss of printed photos is far less than digitals. The longevity of a printed photo is a no brainer. There are photos you find all the time in antique malls that are literally hundreds of years old. With a wedding under our belt and a baby on the way I felt a hyperventilating feeling of wondering how our future daughter would be able to view those photos. I used to sit for hours pouring through photographs my mom had in a closet in our hallway. I would just sit on the floor and go through boxes and albums of pictures. Of course I would rip some off of me and my dad or my grandpa, but isn’t that what they are for?? It’s really “snazzy” at the moment to pull up photos on your phone to show off or fancy slideshows all synced up to your televisions or computer, but what about in 20 years or even 10 years when your kids want to see them and facebook isn’t around anymore? Who knows what the hot thing will be then. Think even further….your grandkids! That’s pretty neat your photographer gives you a CD, many computers are coming without the CD/DVD drive now! UH OH. That’s okay…we offer USBs now. That’s cool for a few years probably. I envision my child looking at a USB in 15 years how I look at those reel things my grandpa plays on the wall in his basement to watch home movies. Where do you get something to view what’s on a USB in years to come?? At any rate, this is my solution I’ve started for our family. Believe it or not, not all of the photos we have are professional and I don’t have all the digitals of our photos. You get photos from other family members of events that have happened through the year, and what do you do with them? An album is kind of out since you don’t have the digitals. And what about those few super sweet cards and drawings and event stubs you want to save that don’t fit in a slip sleeve album? What do you do with them? I decided to design pretty much a “fancy shoebox” by the year to put all the momentos I want to keep. My daughter can now flip through and take whatever she wants. I can show her grandpa and grandma, and lo and behold even tape them up in her room! Chances of a fire hopefully are fairly low, and even so the images and prints given to us would be lost anyway since I don’t have the digital copies so I’m going to play my odds with good ole’ fashion prints. I’m excited to do this every year now. I would encourage everyone to PRINT PRINT PRINT!! While I offer the super swanky custom wood USBs and they are awesome, PRINT what is on them! Better yet, forgo the digitals and order a collection with all your proofs or order your prints! I think people feel they are getting more of a value by getting a flimsy CD with files on it, but when your kid snaps it in two you are kind of out of luck. No one plans on their computer crashing and no one plans on being so busy they don’t have time to back them up, but it happens all the time.
1 comment
I appreciate your post. I agree with you in many ways. Digital media is way more ephemeral than a printed picture, and holding onto a picture in your hands is just not the same as passing someone your mobile device to view your album.
I got directed to this post by a friend of mine who is very caring and lovably neurotic and she’s now (more) worried about her heavily curated digital photo collection. She has invested a lot of time and energy (aka “love”) into all the photos of her kids and the metadata included in each one. But she’s not really “techy” and that equates to very few and infrequent backups.
As a nerd, I can see things both ways; I think there is much more lasting value in the printed copy, but (when possible) I’d always want the digital copy that I can use in any number of ways. I’m currently setting up a picture slideshow to play on my TV for a party tonight. 🙂
I’m going to try to setup for her a hybrid approach and try to reach a balance between digital and printed, between intangible bits and bytes and a photo that fades with the passing of time. I’m going to propose setting up for her an automated local backup (to an external harddrive using a program I love called SyncBack) as well as a cloud (perhaps Dropbox or OneDrive) copy. But maybe even more importantly, I’m going to try to create a process by which she can easily print out her best photos (rated 5 stars perhaps) and a quick thumbnail view of a lot of the others. What is key is there needs to be a printing (either on the back if possible, or on a separate sheet) to their location in the digital archive. If we do it correctly, her (currently young) children will be able to see the prints in the family album and hopefully comprehend the love that their mom put into this digital collection years down the road and therefore be motivated to cherish and preserve it. I don’t think that an included letter from their mother in the back would hurt either in this regard. 🙂
I think that without at least some corresponding number of printed photos, a folder full of family pictures that took years to gather can be ignored just as easily as that old laptop or thumb drive that we toss out. I’m hoping we can strike a balance between the digital and print mediums.
Thanks for the article.
Sincerely,
Walter