Going back to print photos

I love spending time at my Mum’s house going through our old family photo albums, I’m conscious this is something we don’t have for my daughter. Despite having 1000s more photos due to the convenience of camera phones, they’re all in the cloud and rarely take time to look at them, Apps occasionally pop up ‘memory’ photos and I realise I’d have a massive backlog to print off photos of her / our mementos.

is there an easy way to surmount this legacy vacuum?

Something I’m guilty of not doing myself, but….

Take time to catalogue your photos – and put the special ones in a dedicated folder – and maybe print some of the special ones.

Would be my advice

My kids loved looking at photos when they visit their gran so I started to print our pictures a few years ago, not too many, just the holidays/birthday/Christmas times and a few others through the years mixed in. They still enjoy dipping into them now and they are in their late teens!
I just use the snapfish app, the quality isn’t the best but you get 50 free every month (just pay P+P) so I do this a few times each year and have built up about 3 albums of memories now which is nice. I have also downloaded them all to a hard drive, I empty the phone once a year onto it as I don’t use the cloud. If the house goes up in flames I have said they need to get themselves out as I am grabbing the pictures/hard drive as the insurance will replace everything else but not the memories.

I have a couple of Google Home Hubs in the house. These pop up photos from Albums I’ve created in Google Photos (so, a little bit of effort) and also random photos from the past 12 months. They’re great as a wee reminder to go look out some other photos too. I also have stacks of older printed photos and thousands of slide/transparencies which I never look at. I’ve scanned a few hundred so at least they are easy to find. Maybe a bit of a winter project to get more scanned.

PS..I meant to add, the first couple of times I printed the pictures I thought I would bulk print, something like 500 for £50 as there was a deal, and just downloaded them in bulk to save time without paying attention. When I got them quite a lot had been cropped so we’re missing heads etc. apparently the dimensions of phone pictures is different from print dimensions which can often result in them being cropped so you often have to review/edit each picture to avoid this, hence I only do smaller quantities now as I lose the will to live if I do more than about 50. If you are printing hundreds then I find CEWE/Boots online are better quality than snap fish and also better value for big orders usually, but if you are printing smaller quantities and not as fussed about paper quality then the free snapfish ones are fine.

Photo books are a good option.

You can do them for specific events like a holiday, or just do an annual photo summary.

They can take a while to layout nicely, although I think a lot of the websites now have an auto layout function.

I generally use Photo box.

I created some of these for my daughter’s early years as I figure she won’t remember them but might like to look back at what we used to get up to. She digs them out every few months and enjoys having a look through them.

If you get a few big prints at Snapmad you can get 25 free prints. I get a few A4 prints and 25 “free” which go on the wall within a frame I made with mini clothes pegs. When I get the next order the prints are put in an album. So much better than 25k photos in Google.

+1 photo books

I use Blurb. When i get back from this holiday I’ll do one for the year. I use the free pc software and take my time. I’ll often wait for a discount code. I usually do 8 inch by 10 inch books with 100 to 120 pages. I tend not to do more than a photo a page. The book and deivery can be expensive. But it usually works out at 50p ish per page. With an image rap hard cover hard cover and the slightly heavier paper they feel really high quality and last

I have actually gone one further.

Pit actual film in actual cameras and be sparing (because eits bloody expensive). Making the photos count,i have taken alot less phone photos and more of them are memory/moments i wast to remember.

Ofcourse being an all or nothing kind of a guy i know take photos on about 25 different cameras up to 110 years old on various formats and develop and print them myself 😀

But the act of making photo taking “special” really does have an affect on your desire to show them .

Another vote for photo books. They are a convenient way to put together the equivalent of an album. I do one each year plus a book for special subjects like trips. Mostly I’ve used Blurb but recently I’ve had discount codes for Sal Digital which are super quality but hideously expensive.

ive catalogued all my images in lightroom, all the folders in windows explorer are named and in years. At least that way my boys can identify what’s what and who’s who in years to come.

+1 photo books

I use Blurb.

Same here. I do an “our year” photo book asking similar lines, and occasionally a defecated one for a big trip.

Doesn’t take too long and the blurb software is really good.

But it does make me realise how many junk photos I have.

I’m another **** that’s gone back to film. Film SLR cameras are cheap these days second hand, and they take lovely photos. Much nicer than any phone photo. I’ve ended up with a collection of photos that, for every one, I’ve considered carefully what I’m taking a picture of and why. You capture the most important moments.

A roll of 36 exposure film is about £12 if you buy in bulk and then development with someone like Gulabi is about £8.

In addition, similar to scotroutes, we have a Chromecast and that is set up to show photos I’ve taken recently on my phone or photos of specific family members.

A few years back my Canon inkjet printer produced cracking prints but it drank ink at an alarming rate and the cost to replenish was about 35% of a new printer

4×6 saved the ink a bit saving 10×8 for the odd few landscape pics

a defecated one for a big trip.

that’s a bit of a niche publication

Photo books seems a good idea, though never done one myself.

My view on prints is resist the urge to print tons of 6x4s because you can get 50 for “free” and get a few done at 10×8 at least. 6×4 is barely any better than looking at them on a phone screen.

Shooting film is a pretty all-in solution to this problem, but agree about it making you think much more carefully about the shot. I haven’t done any for a while, but when I did I used to use Photo Express in Hull (by post) for developing – they have a develop and scan only service (no prints) which worked out very reasonable, so you can store them digitally and get a few big prints of the ones that turn out well, rather than getting everything including the duds printed 6×4.

Shooting film is a pretty all-in solution to this problem,

For sure the two enlargers and a whole bunch of chemistry, even more so. Small memory cards in digital cameras has a similar effect for me except I am a pretty terrible chimper.  I mainly just like using old cameras, take photo and forget about it until i develop get to live the memory twice.

Having been dealing with an estate recently – we’re looking at scanning old family photos to put them into a digital format, permitting family photos to be shared across the kids. Any recommendations from folk for a decent scanner to capture these types of image – all less than A4, budget up to £350 or so…..sounds like 600dpi or so is a reasonable resolution to go after..

Any scanner will do that no bother. Cheapest hp here works grand at 600dpi.

Its the faff of keeping everything dust free. Also it takes ages.

I have a canoscan life 300 flatbed which is reasonable. The image quality was never great to begin with so any extra detail a more expensive scanner could capture would be wasted.

The image quality was never great to begin with so any extra detail a more expensive scanner could capture would be wasted.

Agreed. If its just capturing snapshots from a selection of brownies and instamatics* through the ages crack on.

If you have large format contact prints of ranging vistas taken by ansel adams possibly think about something fancy.

* Not that there is anything wrong with them but they aren’t sharp enough for super special scanning to pick up.

We a photo book each year.

My wife was a wedding photographer so when she does it it’s much better laid out than the years I do it.

I love flicking through them. But it does take hours to chose photos, get rid of 100’s from the year and put it into an agreeable layout

I went back through my 35mm and aps prints this month. The aps photos are just in a massive stack with no dates or any idea of what year things happened

The 35mm are still in paper wallets but at some point I’ve written years and rough months on.

Looking back through old photos of my grandad serving in the middle east there were some love letters home and messages written on the rear which is probably lost in modern photography and communication.

I use Groupon deals at Colorland for photo books https://www.groupon.co.uk/landing/colorland