My wife and I went to an eighth-grade football game where our granddaughter’s band was playing spirit music and I shot photos with our digital camera, 310 to be exact. And we do not share many photos on social media. We share prints.
Prints? Yes, prints.
Every few months I select our best photos and have prints made. Prints have become keepsakes. We’ve gifted family photo boxes and new photos are reviewed and placed into the box, usually prompting a look through all the others. Photo boxes are less likely to be lost with a phone, deleted, hacked or glitched out of existence.
People hoard gigabytes of digital photos and vow to get prints made “someday.” A few tips for making “someday” today:
- Play. Store and delete images on your phone or computer. Change the frame proportion (4×6 is the best), adjust quality and practice uploading and downloading files.
- Don’t play when you need prints from a special occasion. Photograph your dog and take images through the entire process. Just don’t check out.
- Edit aggressively. Out of those 310 photos I found 20 that were the best. What is the best? I edit for content and quality. My wife edits for memories. Both are best!
- Find a vendor that makes you happy. There are apps and websites that print locally within the hour for 39 cents each or others that mail prints for 12 cents each plus shipping. We use Walgreens because it is close, provides next-day pickup, and seasonally offers discounts from 60 percent off to 8 cent prints when you order over 100.
- Order copies. We order for ourselves, the faces in the photos and other family members. Friends comment that even prints aren’t indestructible. I agree. But what do people seem to say after they race out of a burning house or are evacuating? “We grabbed our phone, the kids, the dog and the family photos.”
