Is photo printing in this digital age even necessary? I am sure this is a question that comes to your mind every time you take pictures. You do wonder if it’s not counter-productive to make printed copies of your digital photos. It’s very easy and handy to take photos these days with portable digital cameras and smart mobile phones. These phones are stored digitally on our phones and cameras. We get access to our fond memories on the go as long as we have access to our mobile phone. Yaay! It’s the age of Cloud Storage! It even gets better, it’s the digital era, one would think. You can now store your photos in the cloud and access them any time, anywhere and from any other device that can connect to the internet. Aside from having your photos handy, you can easily share them with friends and family via e-mail and social media. So, you’d ask again – why should I waste money on printing photos when digital copies come with these benefits? In this article, I will tell you why it’s very important, maybe even more important than ever to print your photos. It is also worth pointing out that keeping digital photos and sharing on social media come with their own demerits. However, that is not the purpose of this article. We will discuss that in the future. So, back to the question – why should you make printed copies of your photographs? I will give you five (5) reasons why it is important to print your most important photos. 5 Reasons You Should Print Your Important Photos Photo prints are concrete Digital cameras and smartphones have made it very easy for us to take tons of pictures. Yeah, that is cool but it comes with its own problems. As we take more and more photos, we may even forget about taking them. Have you ever been in a situation where you took so many pictures at an event but you made a mental note of your favorites? Now you are at home trying to find your favourites but they are lost in the stream of photos on your phone. I know this sounds like you but don’t beat yourself up, we have all been there. Here is what I am saying in essence – if you snap a lot of pictures with your phone, a week from now, you’ll probably have trouble looking for the special ones. Therefore, if you have favorite photos you would like to see over and over, PRINT IT. Print it, put it in a picture frame and place it on your desk or wall. You can always look at it any time you want, even when your computer or phones are shut down. Any Technology can fail Be it your computer hard disk or mobile phone memory, storage systems can combust or get damaged. This is a good document, so you shouldn’t just have digital copies of your photographs, make printed copies of those ones you really like. Backups of backups are always a good practice, and printing photos is a good backup too. Yes, there are cloud options but as you upload more and more photos, keeping your cloud account might be too expensive to maintain. I’ve had to download my favorite pictures and shut down my iCloud account because I couldn’t keep up with the monthly payment. When technologies fail, you have your printed photos to go back to. Think about your Grannies! When you decide not to print your photos, do you keep grandpa and grandma in mind? You can make your grandma’s day by providing them with printed memories (photos) when they visit. Our old relatives are hardly good at operating modern devices like computers and mobile phones. So, print your photos for the sake of your friends and family who aren’t good with technology. Show only the Relevant Photos Often when you give your photos to family and friends to view, you only want them to see particular photos and not some other ones. Also, we all tend to keep scores of similar photoshoots on our phones for whatever reasons we have. You don’t want to bore people by making them scroll through thousands of similar photos on your phone. Why don’t you show them only selected photos from your print collections? This way, you get to control what you want anyone to see. Privacy! Privacy!! More Privacy!!! One day, a friend came to me asking for a loan. I didn’t want to give him any loan because he’s a bad debtor, so I told him I didn't have any money. Shortly after that, he asked about the boat cruise I had the previous weekend. I gave him my phone to go through the pictures I took from the cruise. All was going fine until a bank credit alert came in while my phone was with him. He did see the amount of money that just entered my account. It got worse, a WhatsApp notification followed from the creditor, thanking me for giving him the loan he just paid back. I had to give the loan to the bad debtor.
