A sad day -- while checking out on my weekly trip to Target, the photo lab was gone. Replaced with white walls.
It should be said: I never used this lab for client photos. I did use it for a quick print of my son for a relative, or to test print something I was working on in photoshop without spending much.
These days, we all take more photos than ever before in history. Every 2 minutes, humans take more photos than existed in the world 150 years ago. Every Day, we upload an average of 1.8 BILLION digital images online (no need for calculators, I'll tell you: that's 657 Billion a year). Awesome!!! Why are all the local photo labs closing?
One estimate is that 1 in 100,000 photos taken becomes a print.
If we aren't printing these photos, where do they end up?
Pictures taken only 6-7 years ago are often sitting on a type of media that are no longer supported. In 5 years or less, DVDs and USB drives are expected to be obsolete. All hard drives will eventually fail. Click here to read my own trials with outdated technology. Will the pictures we upload to Facebook & other websites be there in 20 years? We don't know, it's out of our control.
There is concern that the Most Photographed Generation (our children) will not have any photos of themselves to look back on in 50 years. All those photos will be on obsolete devices.
What can you do? Print a few! Maybe make a paper album every year or so. Hey, I know! You could hire a professional photographer to take great photos of your family and manage the printing, too (it just so happens . . . ).
Here's an article about the best online photo printing services.
For a little more money and a little higher quality, I recommend Artifact Uprising. They are a Colorado photo printing company with cool products and high printing standards.
Do you have a strategy for printing phone photos of your children? I'd love to hear it below!
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