I have recently made a few posts on social media encouraging you to join the Print2014 trend and print and enjoy your digital photos in a tangible way rather than displaying them on your IPhone or computer screen. I have been inspired by a series of ‘quotes by NoOne’ from Preveal that makes fun of the emerging generation that shares their images on Facebook, consumes them as slideshows and request DVDs of high res files from professional photographers never to print a single enlargement to grace their walls.
As someone said, “we will be the generation with the most amount of pictures, but with the least amount of photographs.“
How many tiny flash drives full of pictures were lost? How many times hard drives failed? (I had two hard drives that became unreadable within the last 12 months!) How many IPhones crashed and rebooted themselves to a virgin clean factory restore state, all the photos gone? (John’s did it only recently).
Do you still have a DVD reader on your computer? (Only John’s laptop got one in our household). Do you know that there is a proposed scheme to gradually change a USB socket size from mid 2014? If you are storing your photos on remote cloud server how many years are you prepared to pay for this service without switching providers? Do you believe that a dotcom server never go out of business?
The technological innovation shows no signs of abating. A copy of our wedding video on VHS tape gathers dust because we threw away an old tape-chewing player – it became obsolete.
I embrace #print2014 trend because it addresses my frustration with how easy it is to lose access to precious memories.
Prints will never go obsolete, especially if they are printed on a professional paper. 100 years from now they will still look good. They wouldn’t crash or get corrupted. They will only increase in value as time goes by. Even if you don’t bother putting them in an album or a frame, your grandchildren will be happy to discover those prints stashed in a forgotten shoebox in the attic!
And here is the proof that I follow my own advice – prints from the photos I captured during our Venice trip in 2006. It only took me 6 years or so!
