Sorry, we’ve been quiet the last couple of days. The goal is to publish a blog every day, but Mark and I are still trying to work out some kinks.
Today, we have a simple tip for everyone: Print your pictures!
If you’re older than 20 years old, you probably remember looking at photo albums or piles of loose pictures stuck in a drawer or shoe box. You laughed at the silly clothes your parents wore and wondered how they could ever have looked that young. And you remembered different places you lived as you grew up. You saw your grandparents and some other old folks who look like they might be related, but you don’t ever remember meeting them. As a genealogy buff, I love to look at the old black and whites of relatives. Today, we get photo CDs and pictures attached in our emails. You look at them and might even save a copy or print them out on photo paper, but probably not. But, after a hard drive failure or computer upgrade, those photo files disappear – forever. Don’t let this happen to you.
Now that Mark has all of you organizing your photo files (you did go and organize your files, right?), let me remind you of something he mentioned in Part 1 – back-up your photos! Hard drives die every day. Everybody knows they should back-up files; do you really have to experience a hard drive failure to drive the point home?
Where were we? Oh, yeah, printing pictures….Do it! There are plenty of places you can have pictures made without spending much, and, later, we’ll mention some of our favorite printers and talk about ensuring you get on paper what you see on your screen. Today, I just want to make sure you go out and print some pictures so the next generation can sort through the magic paper memories.
Print some for your walls, and take them into the office for your desk. I used to rotate some of my photos in a display in my office, so visitors would ask about them. It gave me a chance to show off a little (not a bad thing if you’re trying to sell one or two), but it also gave me a chance to hear opinions about what people liked and disliked in my photography. The upstairs hallway walls in our house are covered with a chaotic collage of our family pictures (oddly enough, we are pretty chaotic bunch). If you are printing them out on a regular basis, you don’t care if the nasty sun will fade them, just keep throwing more of them up (you have the originals organized and backed up).
Give them away as gifts. They are much more personal than the gift cards everyone loves so much. Wait a minute, I love gift cards…..heck, give them pictures with the gift cards.
Here is one of the 30 I sent in tonight. Show people how you’re having fun.
