Why Having Only Digital Images is a Bad Idea

We all love to share our photos with the world on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and through email. It’s quick and easy! Our love for sharing our photos online has led most of us to believe that we only need to have digital images when we have our photos taken.

Think of the investment of time and money you make to find a photographer, make yourselves look great and do the actual photo shoot. After all that effort, wouldn’t you like to have something on your family room wall to be able to sit and look at while you’re relaxing; a constant reminder of the love you guys share and the growth over the years? That might not happen if you choose to only get the digital images from your session.

Getting solely digital images only is a bad idea for a few reasons.

Technology fails! 

The first reason is that technology fails. Your computer in which you stored your photos on could crash and you would lose all your images.

The USB drive you had the photos on can get lost or damaged, losing your files. If you don’t have them backed up in multiple spots, you run the risk of losing them forever.

Photographers don’t typically hold on to clients photos for a long time due to the volume they process, so you may completely lose out if your technology fails.

Technology changes

Another good reason that having digital images only is a bad idea is technology changes.

Remember the floppy disc? What if your photos were stored on those? You will likely have a hard time finding a place today that can get photos off those forms of storage to share or print.

We have USB drives now but what will the future hold? Will the USB you have now work in 10 years? 20 years? If the answer ends up being no and you didn’t get anything printed, then those photos are all lost.

Digital images are only meant to be temporary storage

They are not made to last forever. Archival prints and albums on the other hand are made to last 150 years, sometimes longer. This means that you will have something to pass down generation to generation. You can’t do that with digital images.

Archival prints last many years

While we’re on the topic of passing photos down to future generations, they need to be printed on archival paper which has certain chemical properties. Walmart, Walgreens, etc. don’t have those capabilities.

Getting archival prints through your photographer will ensure that they will last many years to come. Photos you print at Walmart and other consumer printers will change color and fade over a short period of time. You will have nothing to pass down to your grandchildren if you only have non-archival prints.

Quality matters

The quality and color consumer print labs produce is not equal to those produced by a photographer’s lab.

The photographer’s computer monitors are calibrated to their print lab to ensure the photo they print matches exactly what the photographer created.

You will not have that same experience printing at Walmart. The colors they offer will not be as high of a quality as those ones from a professional photographer.

The photographer saves you time

We are such a busy society that is constantly on the go.

You get the digital prints because you want to print them on your own. However, when will you find time to go to the store or online, upload the photos, take the time to find the perfect crop of each size and then pick them up? After doing this, you still have to frame the photos and decide how they should be hung.

Even though it is pretty easy to upload, crop and print on your own, it takes extra time that most of us just don’t have. Most of the time the USB gets thrown in a drawer and forgotten about and nothing gets printed.

Yes, you may have uploaded your photos to Facebook or Instagram, but when Facebook and Instagram are gone, so are your photos. Look at MySpace; not many people still actually use the site anymore, and many may have lost access to many photos that were only available on there.

Think about the future

It is very important to get the archival quality prints of your session from the photographer. They will last many years to come and you will have beautiful art pieces of your family to proudly display in your home.

The photographer who chooses to just shoot a ton of photos and give them all to you on a disc without the physical prints, is not doing you a favor. You are paying them and yet, you still have more work to do if you get around to going through the ton of photos to pick and print the few you will want to display.

Yes, photography gets expensive, but most photographers have easy payment plans which makes it possible for everyone to have beautiful photos.

You still might want photos to share online, and that’s fine. A lot of photographers, including myself, present you with the complimentary sized digital images when you purchase prints in certain sizes. That way, you not only have the physical print to hang, but you also get to share the same photo online. It’s the best of both worlds!

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Captured by Lorraine-Hampshire Il, 60140 | Phone:630-677-2291 | Email: capturedbylorraine@gmail.com