When was the last time you had your photos printed? Chances are, it was more than a year ago or more. As a society, we produce way too many photos than we care to admit to ourselves. With smartphones and digital cameras in our hands, we take trillions of photos every day. Many of those don’t even make it to social media since that platform is for the well-curated ones, do they? Many of these photos will be forgotten; remembered only when it’s time to empty your storage space and cloud account.
But even though people barely have their photos printed anymore, photo printing is still alive and well. Just look at how technology can reproduce fine art. It wasn’t the same as people remember it when they have to take the film to the drug store and wait 24 hours to get the prints. But photo printing managed to evolve with the times. In fact, Polaroid is making a great case for its comeback. The company released a line of polaroid cameras that millennials and Gen Z are going gaga over.
Quality Over Quantity
Take a look at your old photos tucked in a box in your basement. Chances are that more than half of those are not good enough to be on your social media. The cameraman either snapped the photo while you’re rolling your eyes or chewing your mouth. And there’s no way these could be corrected. You won’t know until two days later how you look at these photos.
But such waste is all forgotten now. You can still choose to print those goofy photos but only because you want to. You have a choice now. You can even improve the quality of the photos by using filters and adjusting the brightness, contrast, color, etc. Every print matters now. If you print a photo, that image means something to you.
Ease and Convenient
The devices available today make it easy for anyone to print any photos they want. You can print photos straight from your phone. That’s how convenient it is now. Those portable printers that you can take anywhere with you have become ubiquitous. You just need to tap a button on your phone, and the prints will come right out. You could give the photos away as souvenirs or mementos of an event you attended with friends or family.
Safety
People love looking at old photos. They remind them of great and even not-so-great memories. That’s why you keep all those goofy photos on your hard drive. These are reminders of how great of a time you had during that day. While you don’t necessarily want to print these, you don’t want to lose them, too.
News flash, printed photos are far safer than storing these in a digital device. If you truly value these photos, they should be in printed form. Your accounts can be hacked. Your hard drive can be wiped out. It takes a single computer virus to delete these important photos forever.
Photo printing isn’t dead. It just changed its form. It’s no longer the same process you remember it to be. It’s better; much better than printing a whole roll of film and throwing away half of the prints developed.
