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PSA - Backup or Print Your Favorite Photos

Earlier this month I ran the updates released by Microsoft and suddenly I was in a world of hurt. My computer would no longer work. About a year ago an updated caused my computer to no longer “talk” to my NAS which is where I backup my photos. Google has been squawking at me about running out of the free disk space so I’ve been dumping my photos from my phone onto my laptop hard drive. The perfect storm... photos aren’t backing up locally, “the cloud” backup is full, and my computer is kaput! Panicked I removed the hard drive from my computer into an external drive enclosure and plugged it into my husband’s laptop and held my breath. 

Whew! All my photos were still there! Hallelujah. 

But what if my hard drive was corrupted? What then? As someone who takes a lot of photos (even more now that I don’t have to print every single one to see if it’s any good), digital photos are revolutionary as far as being able to take a million shots for THE one perfect shot. And honestly, while I don’t always delete the imperfect ones, it is the perfect ones that I was preemptively mourning when I thought my data on my hard drive might be lost.  These “perfect photos” are the ones I print and put into frames or photo albums. And I do more than print just one. I print them for the grandparents, my kids and my siblings. 

You’re probably wondering why? Here are just a few:

It only takes one kid borrowing your $800 phone to look at photos and then dropping it into the toilet to realize a photo album can’t fall into the toilet. (Yes, this has happened to me; No I’m not still bitter about it...)

Your phone or digital camera is in your pocket and you jump into the pool to save a kid from drowning... (True story) ... bye, bye photos (and camera or phone).

Kids love to look at photos. Let them! Printed photos mean they can carry them around, kiss them, gum them up with sticky fingers and more. A 13¢ 4x6 print is $799.87 cheaper than a phone. Hell, 100 photos at 13¢ each is $13.00 or $787 cheaper than a phone.

Photos are best viewed in a larger format than your phone screen. Especially photos of exotic places you’ve visited.

Photo albums and scrapbooks of your last vacation or the visual story of the building of your new home are great coffee table conversation pieces. And when in the company of friends, put down the phone already!

If the only photos of your kids on your walls are from the annual school picture day, you are falling down on the parenting job. Print fun and happy photos of your kids and put them around the house please.

Worse than #5, the photos of the previous school years are behind the current photo in the frame. Put them in a photo album, it’s way more accessible for when they bring home their first serious boyfriend or girlfriend. You can find 8x10 photo albums here.

Moving on to conspiracy theories... In theory, were you to survive a nuclear blast, the electromagnetic pulse that proceeds the blast is much larger than the blast zone and will completely wipe all electronic data. So if you’d like any image of you to survive, you should print your photos. Well, at least your favorite ones, of your good side.