Print your photos. Wedding photos, smartphone photos, engagement pictures, all of it. You and your loved ones will be able to cherish your pictures for decades to come, but it requires more than just digitally backing them up. If you’re on the fence about why, or you’re not sure where to print or digitally back up your photos, read on.
Our Cherished Memories of Printed Photos
I remember, as a little girl, sitting at my grandmother’s dining room table with my mom and aunts. Every summer, we’d get together and go through tons and tons of family photos – of my mom’s childhood, of my grandmother’s childhood, tintypes of our great ancestors – everything. We’d identify all of or family members by name as we worked on our family tree. We’d tell stories of the memories brought up by each photo and laugh together at the seemingly reckless childhoods of the kids in the 70s.
Joe’s mom has a photo framed in her house of her belated parents. They’re young – early 20s, maybe – sitting on the hood of a car, laughing. It’s such a beautiful candid photo that, the moment I saw it, I felt overwhelmed with emotion. Young love was on full display, but in the photo was a couple that had already lived their full lives. They spent decades in love. Unfortunately, they passed just a few months before Joe and I met, so while I never had the opportunity to meet them in person, I could feel their energy through this single photo.
Both of these stories influenced us to build a collage wall in our home. It will contain our favorite photos of our parents, grandparents, and other loved ones. When we have children, we’ll stand in front of these photos and tell stories of the people we love, so that even though our children won’t get to meet each of these beautiful souls, they’ll still have the opportunity to know them.
To Print Your Photos? Or Not to Print?
Imagine if our ancestors grew up with smartphones. There would be more pictures of them, that’s certain – but would we have ever had an opportunity to see them, generations later? Would I have been inspired to become a photographer after spending summer nights looking through hundreds of prints, and would I have ever had the opportunity to experience the true love of Joe’s grandparents through a framed photograph?
The answer is, sadly, probably not. Every one to three years, when the average person gets a new phone, the photos you once cherished become harder and harder to find. Maybe you were lucky enough to have your photos backed up before you lost your old phone, but what are you going to do? Pass your iPhone 11 on to your grandchildren? Cross your fingers that Facebook still exists 50 years down the line?
Prints are a beautiful and tangible way for you and your loved ones to look at your photos. But they’re also way more than that. A physical copy of your image is one more ‘backup’ that you’ll have if your digital copies get destroyed.
How to Back Up Your Wedding and Cell Phone Photos
Prints can be destroyed, too. With our encouragement to print your wedding photos, your senior photos, your candid photos, and your cell phone photos, does not come permission to neglect your digital files.
Back up every single photo you cherish more than once, and in more than one way.
Here’s how to back up your cell phone photos
- Use Google Photos or iCloud to back up your cell phone or tablet photos. Check regularly to make sure your backups are syncing.
- Yearly, go through the past year’s photographs on your phone. Mark your favorites and print them. Keep a separate printed album for each year that passes.
Here’s how to back up your wedding pictures, engagement pictures, or other professional photographs
- As soon as your photographer delivers your photos, download every single one (even the ones you don’t like – you might change your mind years down the road). Don’t wait. While it’s not likely, if something happens to the hosting site or USB and your photographer’s copies of the pictures, you could lose your photos for good.
- If your online gallery allows you to download multiple resolutions of your photos (ie high resolution and web resolution), download both. (For the record, high resolution is great for print, whereas web resolution is what you should be uploading to social media to avoid those pixelated, “what the hell, Facebook??” moments.)
- Now, back up all of them. Upload them to Google Drive or Dropbox, or another storage site where they can be accessed from anywhere in case something happens to your computer. And if you can, have them saved in more than one account – just in case.
- Print your favorites. Print them for yourself. For your loved ones. For your friends. Get all the prints. We recommend you order an album of all of your favorites for yourself and your parents, and gift loose prints to other important people in your life.
- Ask your photographer how long your gallery link will be active. Before your photos get taken down, double check that all of your photos have been downloaded and backed up. This is your final chance to save your photos. While many photographers will save copies of important sessions beyond the contracted date (we do), sometimes things can go wrong on our end, too.
Where to Print Your Professional Photos
Joe and I both know a lot more than the average person about print. Not to sound dorky, but we have degrees in it.
If you’ve hired us as your photographers, you have a few options on ordering prints:
- Order through the shop in your online gallery. We want you to print without budget being a hinderance, so these loose prints, albums, and keepsakes balance quality with attainability. They also won’t price you out of gifting prints to your friends and family, or deter them from wanting to buy copies of their favorite photos for themselves.
- Ask us directly about our Fine Art Print collection. These are archival quality prints intended to hold up extraordinarily well over generations with a luxury, fine art feel. In a dream world, every single couple has a luxury photo album of their wedding photos – and classic, framed prints hanging on their walls.
- Take your downloaded photos and print them whereever you’d like. We can’t guarantee color or quality when you’re ordering prints from somewhere else, but the important thing to us is that you actually print them.
Where to Print Your Cell Phone Photos
Since cell phone photos haven’t necessarily been professionally edited and color graded, it’s a little less important where you print these photos. That being said, we have a couple of recommendations, in order of personal preference.
- Mpix. They offer a variety of products at a reasonable quality.
- Walgreens, Walmart, or literally anywhere under the sun. The color shift of a ‘drugstore print’ won’t be as bothersome on a picture that wasn’t ever color corrected to begin with. Again, the key thing here is that you actually print your photos. Just be sure to level your expectations to match the quality you’re going to receive.
It Doesn’t Start – Or End – There
All in all, backing up your photos is so important. Prints and online backups are both a part of that process. Before you get to the point of printing your photos, you’ll want to make sure you’ve hired a professional photographer with good backup processes on their end to avoid any issues prior to the photos being delivered to you. At the core of our workflow is an intensely detailed backup plan. We’ve thought of it all. Check back to read our post on backup systems that extend beyond your wedding day for extra piece of mind.
