Why You Need To Print Out Your Digital Photos ASAP

Today no one remembers what taking photographs on film feels like. Taking a picture today is as simple as whipping out your phone, or if you want higher resolutions you can go the way of a DSLR camera. When you are done, you can save the pictures on a computer or just keep them in your phone to show your friends at your latest get together. Which is where Costco comes in.

Gone are the days of trooping to a film development shop, with their darkrooms and special chemicals. If you want to see a picture, you just open a folder on your computer, or check the images on your iPhone. They are digital, so they should live forever, right? This may not necessarily be true.

Old photographs, from say 50 years ago, hold history. Even if the people in the photographs are not present, or the events have passed, you can still get an idea of what was happening at that time. Our history books, museums and old family albums are filled with printed photographs that tell us tales of things we were not around to experience, or too young to remember.

People still have the desire to preserve history, and today it is so much simpler and faster. A quick selfie preserves that moment you and your fiancé were in Vienna, or a quick photograph captures that celebrity you spotted shopping at the local farmer’s market. Due to this, today people have hundreds even thousands of unprinted photographs, which they hope that at any point in time someone could access because they are digital files which live forever.

So Why Print Photographs?

However, while digital photograph files live forever, the means of accessing these files do not. Opening digital photographs requires software that can decode their format. However, as time passes by, old software gets replaced by software that only reads certain formats of photographs. If your photograph is saved in the old format, then it becomes inaccessible.

With the entire world giving in completely to the digitization of everything, it is possible that at some point in the future there will be holes in history. Possibly massive ones. This is because people do not feel the need to print their photographs.

The common reasons why people do not have physical copies of their photographs are:

• Printing is tedious
• Printed photographs are cumbersome to carry around
• Digital files are easily accessible
• Digital photographs are easy to share online, or wirelessly

It is all about the convenience.

While convenience is a gift of the digital age, several years from now, it may turn out to be problem. Yes digital files are convenient, and in some ways immortal, but they are not immune to the ravages of time. The best ways to preserve those memories that you hold dear is to print them out. Having both a digital and a physical copy, gives you the convenience with the posterity. Start printing those photographs now, Costco’s offers photo printing services at an affordable price, without any loss in quality