Why You Should Print Your Digital Pictures!
Digital pictures are in your phone, on your tablet, you have a point-n-shoot, and maybe even a DSLR. You can’t escape the selfies, Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook. Today people are taking more pictures than ever before. The sad part is that few of these photographs will survive beyond a year. To many people, a “picture” is only good for the moment. Moms and Dads want to snap every little movement of that new baby. Grandma wants to see everyone one of those too. When you want to show off the new puppy, you pull out the phone. And in a week, those pictures don’t have any real meaning and get “deleted” to make room for more pictures that have little meaning.
What will become of all the pictures taken today? Experts predict 99% of the photographs taken today are soon going to be totally gone and not accessible. Digital images are no longer important enough to most people to actually keep them in printed form! It is estimated that only 1 out of 100,000 photographs taken today will actually end up being a printed photograph. You probably have countless pictures that are just randomly stored with no organization or no way to locate them. Perhaps you have made some effort to file your digital pictures, but even that can seem an overwhelming task. Or those images you were planning on “getting to” get lost with your damaged phone or your computer crashes, lightening strikes! Oh and to add to this, over the years, technology changes so fast, many photographs taken 6-7 years ago are stored on a type of media that is no longer supported. In 5 years or less, your DVD is going to be obsolete as will your USB drives. File types are going to change and the technology of tomorrow may not support these “older” file types.
Perhaps you go to a Professional Photographer to get hose lasting pictures and all you want is someone to “take some pictures and give us the disc”. After all, it IS a “digital world” and it shouldn’t cost very much to “take them down to the 1 hr place” and get prints really cheap. So where are your discs today? I’m guessing, probably in that same drawer where the old cell phone is “lost”. I doubt you have your DVD’s, jump drives, or old floppies on your wall! And when Mom asks if you have that adorable photo of your now 16 year old son or daughter- you know the one when they were 2- and you have to answer, I do, but I have to find it. “It’s on a disk…someplace…I think….maybe we still do…honey, where did we put that disk, jump drive again?”.
So if you are part of this “digital revolution”, let me ask you- where are YOUR photographs? Stuck on some disc or stored out there is cyberspace someplace, hopefully? Why didn’t you actually purchase that $500 canvas to display in your home that your Professional photographer worked so hard to produce for you? That was a “one of a kind” work of ART and an heirloom piece for your family to have and remember that little slice of their life. The wall art will become something that will be passed from generation to generation and it is the only visual way your heirs will see what you looked like and see the love and emotions you expressed the instant that image was captured.
Are you one of the “most photographed generation that doesn’t have a photograph in 10 years”? I guess it wasn’t that important then. Digital was cheap. Cameras were everywhere. It just didn’t seem that important. What will your great-great grandchildren say when they can’t see what it was like when you were a kid. Lost memories are expensive.
