Guest post by Lisa Mathews (Lisa Robin Photography)
Let’s talk about something important—printing your photos. And no, I’m not just saying this because I’m a photographer. I mean, yeah, obviously, I want you to have beautiful pictures, but more than that—I want you to keep them. Like, really keep them. Not just in some folder on your phone that you have to scroll through a thousand screenshots and dog memes to find.
Look, I get it. We live in a digital world. We snap a picture, throw it on Instagram or Facebook, and boom, it’s “saved.” But here’s the thing—social media is NOT a photo album. It’s not a safe place for your memories. If Facebook shut down tomorrow (dramatic, but hey, weirder things have happened), where would all those photos go? What happens if your account gets hacked or deleted? Years of memories—gone. Just like that.
And let’s talk about storing them on your devices. Be honest, when’s the last time you actually looked at the photos buried deep in your camera roll? Or on that external hard drive you swore you’d organize one day? Exactly. Our phones, computers, and cloud storage are just black holes for our pictures. Out of sight, out of mind. You might have thousands of photos, but if they’re not printed, are they really there?
There’s something different about holding a photo in your hands. Flipping through an album. Seeing a framed picture on the wall every day. Prints aren’t just images—they’re little time machines. They bring you back to that moment in a way a phone screen never could. You don’t need WiFi, a login, or a password to relive those memories. They just exist—timeless and real.
Think about your childhood photos. You know, the ones your parents have stuffed in albums or boxes? They might be a little bent or faded, but they’re still here. They’ve survived moves, floods of bad fashion choices, and probably a toddler or two scribbling on them. Can you say the same about your iCloud storage from ten years ago?
Printing your photos isn’t just about keeping them safe—it’s about seeing them, experiencing them. It’s about your kids flipping through albums, your grandkids holding a picture of you on your wedding day, or you walking past your favorite photo on the wall every single day.
So, print them …. frame them…. make albums and for the love of god actually hang them up!! Why spend so much on these images just to forget about them on your harddrive?!?! Don’t let your memories live and die on a screen. Because at the end of the day, technology changes, accounts get lost, and phones crash…. We’ve only been using digital for our memories for a few decades; but prints are how we’ve been preserving memories for hundreds of years.
