When’s the last time you printed a photo, or got a bunch of photos professionally printed? Unless you’re a diehard analogue camera fan, chances are it’s been a while.
The age of smartphones means most of us carry thousands of photos with us at all times, usually storing many more than that somewhere in the cloud. And that’s great in many ways, but digital hoarding is also kind of a drag.
There are so many photos it can be hard to find the ones you’re looking for, and it can also be annoying to show off particular collections during an in-person conversation. This is why it’s a good idea to curate a physical collection of photos after something like a trip or important event. This could mean ordering a book or just printing a few highlights—just get some kind of physical collection. Here are a few reasons.
You don’t have to hand anyone your phone
We’ve all done it: handed our phone to someone to show them a photo. It works, but there are downsides.
For one thing, there’s probably all sorts of things on your phone you don’t want to share with everyone in your life. Maybe they’ll scroll through your photos, looking for similar pictures but instead finding something you’d rather keep private. Maybe a notification pops up that you’d rather your family not see. Or, in the worst-case scenario, maybe someone goes snooping on your device on purpose.
All of these situations can be avoided if you hand them a photo album instead of your phone. And yes, you could also avoid this by using something like AirPlay or Google Cast to show the photos on your TV, but that only works consistently if you’re at home—otherwise, you’re fighting to connect to someone else’s television. It’s a lot easier to just hand someone a photo album.
Curation is its own reward
It is so easy, in this day of cheap cloud storage, to take dozens of photos every day and never think about them. You can always search or scroll when you need something specific, right?
But all of that assumes the art of going through your photos and choosing the best ones is a burden, and not a delight. And I’m here to tell you that there is real joy to be found in going through old photos, choosing the best ones, and deciding to get those—and only those—printed.
It’s also fun arranging these physical photos so that they flow from one to the other. (There’s a reason people used to scrapbook as a hobby!) There’s an art to it, which is satisfying. Yes, you could create digital albums in something like Google or Apple Photos, which is a very worthwhile activity. But that feels like work. Carefully arranging your photos in a way that recreates a fond memory or juxtaposing them artistically is a creative exercise in and of itself. Making things with your own hands is satisfying and good for your brain.
The cloud won’t last forever
Sprawling tech conglomerates like Google and Apple seem like they’ll be around forever, but that just isn’t the case. The history of technology is one where impossibly large companies all eventually disappear, often taking their data with them.
I am not predicting the imminent collapse of any software giants, only pointing out that if something like that happened, there’s a good chance the services where your photos live right now will stop existing. It would be up to you—or the people who come after you—to move the photos off the dying cloud service and onto one that’s still running. Yes, there’s generally a warning, but sometimes life gets in the way and you miss a deadline.
That’s just one scenario. There could be a computer glitch that randomly deletes photos, or you could forget to pay a cloud subscription bill at some future point in your life. Your photos could disappear forever. Physical photos aren’t like that. They’re in your home. Sure, they could be destroyed in an accident or a fire, which is a good reason to keep the digital photos around and backed up. But physical photos are yours in a way anything stored on the cloud is not. That alone makes having some old-fashioned, paper photos around worthwhile.
They’re a tangible reminder of something great
Whether it’s a special event, an epic trip, or a new addition to your family, some things deserve to be commemorated. Printing photos and compiling them is a great way to do that. You are going to value an actual physical object more in 20 years than any Instagram post (assuming Instagram even exists in 20 years).
You can pull the book out during conversations. You can page through it yourself, anytime.
There’s another side to this: your own mortality. I hate to break it to you, but you are going to die someday (sorry). When you do, it will be up to someone you love to sort through your belongings and decide what to keep. A well-curated collection of physical photos is far more likely to be valued than an endless scroll of digital photos. Plus, who wants to end up a ghostbot?
