Comments on: The Importance of Printing your Digitals https://www.colorsplashstudio.com/the-importance-of-printing-your-digitals/ Photography, Branding & Design with Intention Fri, 28 Mar 2014 16:58:37 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.1 By: Walter Mitchell Pelowski https://www.colorsplashstudio.com/the-importance-of-printing-your-digitals/#comment-7224 Fri, 28 Mar 2014 16:58:37 +0000 http://www.colorsplashstudio.com/?p=5845#comment-7224 I appreciate your post. I agree with you in many ways. Digital media is way more ephemeral than a printed picture, and holding onto a picture in your hands is just not the same as passing someone your mobile device to view your album.

I got directed to this post by a friend of mine who is very caring and lovably neurotic and she’s now (more) worried about her heavily curated digital photo collection. She has invested a lot of time and energy (aka “love”) into all the photos of her kids and the metadata included in each one. But she’s not really “techy” and that equates to very few and infrequent backups.

As a nerd, I can see things both ways; I think there is much more lasting value in the printed copy, but (when possible) I’d always want the digital copy that I can use in any number of ways. I’m currently setting up a picture slideshow to play on my TV for a party tonight. 🙂

I’m going to try to setup for her a hybrid approach and try to reach a balance between digital and printed, between intangible bits and bytes and a photo that fades with the passing of time. I’m going to propose setting up for her an automated local backup (to an external harddrive using a program I love called SyncBack) as well as a cloud (perhaps Dropbox or OneDrive) copy. But maybe even more importantly, I’m going to try to create a process by which she can easily print out her best photos (rated 5 stars perhaps) and a quick thumbnail view of a lot of the others. What is key is there needs to be a printing (either on the back if possible, or on a separate sheet) to their location in the digital archive. If we do it correctly, her (currently young) children will be able to see the prints in the family album and hopefully comprehend the love that their mom put into this digital collection years down the road and therefore be motivated to cherish and preserve it. I don’t think that an included letter from their mother in the back would hurt either in this regard. 🙂

I think that without at least some corresponding number of printed photos, a folder full of family pictures that took years to gather can be ignored just as easily as that old laptop or thumb drive that we toss out. I’m hoping we can strike a balance between the digital and print mediums.

Thanks for the article.

Sincerely,
Walter

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