Why You Need To Print Your Photos

I love taking photos; a fact that becomes incredibly obvious after spending more than five minutes with me. More often than not, my camera is like an additional limb at the end of my arm and my long-suffering friends are more than used to me sticking a camera in their face (much appreciated guys; apologies again).

These days, anyone can take a photo. Thanks to smartphones, you don’t even have to own a camera to do it anymore. We are the digital generation with cameras at our fingertips; we snap everything and anything with no limits. Gone are the days where our photos were limited to the 27 snaps you could take on a disposable camera.

As someone who used to buy hundreds of disposable cameras, a true photo-taking lover, naturally I love the wide availability of resources for taking photos these days. But I do sometimes feel that the ease of taking limitless photos means that we, as a generation, don’t appreciate them like they deserve to be appreciated.

Photos gather dust on hard drives, disappear after their 10-second-limit on Snapchat and are forgotten once uploaded to social media.

No one is deliberately neglecting their photos, it’s the nature of our digital world; but I have this fear that all these millions of photos that capture so many memories will just get lost in the noise.

So I’m on a bit of a mission to get all my photos printed, to give them pride of place in scrapbooks and albums and photobooks; to get those memories properly captured outside of my laptop hard drive or my Instagram page.

I’m going old school and making those photos physical.

Printing photos is So. Freakin’. Easy. There are endless places you can have your photos printed and you don’t even need to leave your sofa. You can upload them online and have them delivered to your door. Dreamy no?

I recently discovered Printiki* and have fallen a little bit in love. I’ve used many photo printing services in my time (usually to blue tac eight million photos to my university room… the damage to those walls was fun) but I don’t plan on moving away from Printiki now I've found them. I just think the quality of their photos is so good; there’s no variation in the photo from screen to print. I love that they offer square prints and retro, polaroid-style prints alongside normal photo sizes. And you can add text and borders to your photos to make that scrapbooking/album building even easier. And I particularly love that when you print photos directly from Instagram, there’s no loss of quality whatsoever. This has been such an annoyance in the past when I’ve tried to print photos from Instagram and the filters just don’t transfer to a print well! They also include a cat gif in their confirmation emails sooooo, yup, that's me sold.

If you want to try Printiki out (20 prints for £5.50 FYI), you can get free shipping on your first order using the below code. And if you need some inspo, check out their dreamy Instagram account.

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There’s so many reasons to get printing. The most obvious being the idea of that worst-case scenario. I honestly feel physically sick at the thought of technology failing me and losing a lifetime’s worth of photos. That fear alone is enough for me to spend days of my life printing EVERYTHING (is it weird to have boxes and boxes of photos stacked in your kitchen or nah?).

Plus, if you enjoy photography, don’t ya think having the physical photo helps you see how you can improve on your skills? Whether you’re a pro or not, no one wants blurry, dark photos. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

But my main motivation for printing my photos is that there’s just something special about having a physical photo in my hand. It means I take the time to look and appreciate. It invokes so many memories and having them all together in an album or scrapbook takes me back to a different time.

(And if you’re into scrapbooking, IT MEANS YOU CAN SPEND ALL AFTERNOON IN PAPERCHASE BUYING SCRAPBOOKING STUFF AND HOW MUCH FUN DOES THAT SOUND?!)