Printing and backing up your personal photos

Here’s a slightly different blog post from me today. Rather than show some wedding images I wanted to talk a bit about backing up your own personal photos. Whether they’re your professionally taken wedding photos or your own snaps taken on your Phone, its vitally important you get them printed and backed up, especially the important ones.

Why are back ups so important?

Many moons ago when I were a lad and digital cameras were a twinkle in Canon and Nikon’s eye everything was shot on film. We had disposable cameras, compacts from Argos, polaroids and some folk even had SLRs. With the exception of Polaroids it would be standard procedure to take your spent film to boots or the local camera shop for developing, wait a couple of days before eagerly going back to collect the pack of photo’s which would also contain the negatives. Your favourites would be put in a frame and usually the pack containing the negatives would go in a drawer. In the future those negatives could be used to get reprints and enlargements.

Fast forward to modern times and the vast majority of photos are taken on phones. Modern mobiles have pretty good cameras but sadly the photos are rarely printed, instead they remain on the phone or uploaded to Facebook. I know some people think having the photos stored on your phone is safe but really it isn’t. What if the phone gets stolen, becomes damaged or you forget to transfer the photos when moving to a new phone. They are gone forever, you don’t have that safety net of the negatives in your bottom drawer, you cant get prints on photos you no longer have.

This actually happened to me. A phone developed a fault and I lost several months worth of photos of my kids. I can never get them back.

Photos form part of your family history

So what has actually sparked me to write this blog? Recently a close family member brought round a stack of photos from my childhood to show my wife and children. There were dozens and dozens, it was genuinely fascinating and the memories it brought back were priceless. Of course this was the day before digital cameras so they were all prints, still in their packs and still with the negatives.

I never thought I would care to see old photos of myself but I really enjoyed it (must be an age thing!), and its not just about whether I would like to see them or not but those photos are vitally important for future generations too. Photo’s of yourself, your children, your parents and other loved ones only gain in value as the years go on and get passed down to future generations. I’m not trying to sell you a professional photoshoot here, I really want you to take care of your personal snaps.

A warning from the vice president of Google

So we all know Google and we all know they know their stuff. Only last year Google’s vice president, Vince Cerft, warned that we must print our photos or we risk losing them. This is the most photographed era in time yet the least printed. Rather than repeat too much of his advise here you can read the article in The Guardian. Please do take a moment to read what he has to say.

To give food for thought just stop for a moment and ask if you have anything to pass down to future generations, or do most of your photos only exist in digital version?

But I put them on Facebook, can’t I just download them to print?

Nope.. due to the sheer volume of photos on Facebook they need to heavily compress the digital file. It might look OK on a phone screen which is 3″ wide but try printing that to a decent size such as A4 and you’ll see the huge deterioration in quality. Of course this would be better than nothing but for a photo of a loved one you might want something better.

It isn’t just printing thats important, its backing up

So hopefully by now I’ve convinced you to print some of your favourite photographs, but this is only half the battle. remember we talked about those negatives in your bottom drawer, thats how you need to see your back up. Don’t just leave them on your phone or computer, get them backed up. That way if you loose the printed version you can get another one done.

These days storage is cheap, there even a number of free options you can look into. At the bottom of this blog I’ll list some options for storage options.

Using DVD/USB as a storage option

I’m going to very briefly touch on using USB’s and DVD’s as a storage option due to the fact a lot of people don’t have wedding albums or family photo prints, they opt for digital only. Please don’t assume that having a DVD or USB is a safe long term storage option, you still need back up. Why? Because the media isn’t indestructible or future proof. The latest range of Apple computers don’t have USB ports, in 20 years time I’m pretty sure USB won’t even exist. Its very rare this days that we use CDROMs and most computers don’t come with a CD/DVD drive anymore. Unless you always remember to back up your USB you may find one day it is obsolete. Get a decent back up and get your favourites printed, even if they are just put in a shoe box in the loft!

Where can I get my photos printed?

There are loads of online printers. I use specialist professional photo labs but one company I have seen excellent results from who isn’t just for pro’s is Photobox. They even give the option for you to get 100 free prints when you buy 50..so that should be a cost effective way to get your favourite prints sorted in no time.

Options for online back ups

If you have a computer at the very least get them off your phone or memory card and onto your computer hard drive, then make a second back up onto an external drive. Don’t even consider social media to be a viable back up option.

Next we need to look into option for cloud storage, this is one of the best methods out there.

Google Photos – This is brilliant. Unlimited free photo storage for images less than 16mp. Google will compress larger images (16mp is usually plenty large enough to print from). They also give free storage to video files. Great not only for android users but also for photos from your computer.

Amazon Prime – Amazon offers unlimited photo storage for you and your family members included with Amazon Prime. It isn’t worth signing up to prime for this one benefit but if you’re already a member you could be making use of this.

iCloud – If you’re on an iPhone then iCloud may be the best option. You can upgrade to 50GB storage for about 79p a month. Though remember if you have a separate camera as we;; as your phone you will need a back up system for those photos too. If you change from iPhone to Android remember to download the photos before you stop paying iCloud.

Flickr – A lot of people see Flickr as a way to share and display their photo’s but its also a great method of storage. You get 1TB of unlimited resolution storage.

Dropbox – You get a free 2GB of storage and can then upgrade to 1Tb of storage for £79 a year.

There are loads of other options available, I’m in no way connected with any of the above companies I have just spent a little time finding these options out for you guys.

Here’s a few, relatively random personal snaps I just pulled out of my cloud storage. Most of these are taken on my phone, only a couple with my camera.