Physical Photos in a Digital Age

It is a known fact that we live in what is known as the Information Age, a time where information and data is widely available through technological advances that allow us to overcome the time barrier of conveying information in the past. We often send images over Instant Messaging while we store them on our hard drives or in cloud services such as Dropbox and Google Drive. We have largely abandoned the practice of printing our photos, leaving it for specific events such as birthdays and wedding and other major milestones in life.

Most people do not believe in going the extra mile to print photos because preserving them digitally is a much more  cost-effective and space-saving option. However, I beg to differ with that opinion. In this article, I hope to present to you three main reasons why it is worth the money and effort to print your photos rather than keep them on digital or cloud storage.

Firstly, the vice-president of Google, Vint Cerf warns of the impending Digital Dark Ages where hardware and software is rendered obsolete. In simple terms, the family photos you saved on your computer will not be preserved past the 21st century as the old technology is retired without any way to save photos and other media stored in old file formats like .jpeg. Like how our generation no longer uses floppy disks to store information, future generations will have transcended thumb drives and hard disks to more sophisticated methods of data storage.

Secondly, there is a sense of satisfaction associated with the physical paper and ink photo rather than just keeping it on Instagram or leave it lying on your computer.  A photo serves both as a physical and visual reminder harking back to good times and through nostalgia evoked by print. When you are able to feel the texture of a printed photo that you took, you feel satisfaction seeing a product of your creativity and effort come to fruition. Each photo means different things to different people and this sense of euphoria when you feel a photo is what keeps people printing photos.

Lastly, printing photos enables us to appreciate images better. Due to a large volume of sharing images taking place online over social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, we often scroll through photos mindlessly without taking a moment to appreciate the colors and stories behind each visual. By printing a photo, we spend the time to pick photos that are special and meet the requirements for printing. While helping us to understand what makes a better photo, we also learn how to view the intrinsic value of each photo that cannot be quantified by likes and shares.

We here at Print For Fun believe in the value of printing photos with conviction and our satisfied customers share that same belief as well! We hope that this festive season, you print with us and share beautiful memories with your friends and family!

Yours Sincerely,

The PFF Team

If you would like to shop other products by Print For Fun, then check out our online store here.