Name: Tess
Home: St. Louis
Picture Poll
In honor of the new camera that is wending its way towards my house, I am doing a poll. Tom and I have been having a disagreement about photographs. I have not printed any pictures out in a systematic way for two years now. I think this is a problem and feel vaguely guilty about it; I've created the digital equivalent of my mother's cardboard box that holds two decades worth of pictures. Tom argues that printing out pictures and sticking them in albums is obsolete.
So I'm asking you, Arch Words readers:
1) How frequently do you have physical prints made of your pictures?
2) Once you have prints, what do you do with them?
3) Do you think saving pictures on a computer and/or uploading them to a web site is more important than printing them?
4) In a few decades, how do you think people will look at the photos you've taken this year?
So I'm asking you, Arch Words readers:
1) How frequently do you have physical prints made of your pictures?
2) Once you have prints, what do you do with them?
3) Do you think saving pictures on a computer and/or uploading them to a web site is more important than printing them?
4) In a few decades, how do you think people will look at the photos you've taken this year?
posted by Tess | 7:37 AM
13 Comments:
Hi Tess,
First, hi, how are things?
Second, my wife and I purchased a card for printing out pics at Ritz camera, and I actually like flipping through pics instead of just looking at them on a computer. Jake and Emily make really nice photo albums from Shutterfly (or some place like shutterfly), which I thought was a nice way to preserve photos in a way that people would be more likely to look at. I can't forsee people looking at all the photos we have years from now, but maybe they'll look at some of them. I think you're right about socking photos away on some huge hard drive; I'm not likely to want to 80 gig of photos, the same way I might casually flip through a photo album. Maybe you should do a few and give Tom something tangible to see if that might change his mind.
Aaron (Zaph)
Sorry, that should have read 'I'm not likely to want to peruse 80 gig of photos"
Zaph!!!!!!!!!!! Hi! How are you?
Or should I really be calling you Aaron these days?
Those Shutterfly books do look nice. They're a good way to get a finished product without the hassle of scrapbooking.
Oh, things are good. I got married in April, and we're living in Baltimore (I moved to the area a few years ago for work).
So you and Tom are in St. Louis? I'm sorry my memory is a little hazy; is that where Tom got his PhD? And you're looking into Social Work? Ben looks like he's a lot of fun!
And Aaron or Zaph's fine. :)
I print photos a few times a year.
Every year for the girls' birthdays I do a few scrapbook pages for myself and their grandmothers. So, I print pictures for that.
Then, if I'm sending something to my mother in law, who doesn't have internet access outside the occasional trip to the library, I will usually print some to send to her. Otherwise, I only get prints from the film camera (and almost always get a CD now too).
I do think that getting prints made is a good idea, I just havent' had the time to do do it. Computers and technology are changing so much, I have some pictures of my god daughter on a zip disk, but now, I don't have anything to read it. I'm also afraid of putting them on a hard drive that would crash and I'd loose everything. Although we've worked around that by archiving them in several places.
I hope that they'll be in a format for my daughters and their kids to be able to see when they get older.
Congratulations on getting married!
Condensed history of our post-Penn State lives:
1997-1999: Tess goes to grad school in England, Tom starts PhD program at UNC-Chapel Hill
1999-2002: Tess joins Tom in NC and teaches high school English, Tom finishes PhD
2002-2005: Tom does internship and then post doc fellowship in Philly; Tess works in medical writing for 2 years, then starts freelancing when Ben is born in 2004
2005-present: We all move to St. Louis for Tom's first faculty position
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Having seen the basic futility in keeping snapshots in photo albums anymore, I stick with printing for a few specific reasons: 1) A memorable trip. We have an album of stuff from St. Louis, weddings, etc. 2) To give to people -- my parents are fond of this, although I can usually just email them the JPEG and my dad'll print it out himself. 3) To hang on the walls.
Fundamentally, I see Flickr as a replacement for the photo album. I can upload whatever I want and look at it from anywhere. But that doesn't eliminate the need for printing -- it just brings it down to a much more manageable number.
first, hey aaron! [tries and fails to remember the name of that great record store in baltimore. on admiral's point or something like that.]
. . . just to clarify, i'm not against albums. i'm just against looking at them as a gold standard or feeling bad for not producing them at regular intervals. i think keeping pictures on a hard drive or more stable electronic storage medium is a big step above a physical shoebox, and that so many people are using this method now that it should be a pretty stable way to keep photos.
i think blogging with photos or flickr is really a lot better than just sticking photos in albums, because pictures without any explanations are nowhere near as good as a written context.
and getting photo books printed would be fine, too. i guess my main issue is that i don't see having the things in a physical form as automatically better than something electronic. it seems to me that access and context are important parts of keeping photos, and although an album has an advantage (in some ways) regarding access, it is not necessarily much better than a shoebox for context unless, you know, you write some stuff.
I never print them unless for gifts. I burn them to disks and keep them in a disk container in the safe. The better ones of random stuff shows up on the blog sometimes, and when I get ambitious, I add kid pics to movie maker slide shows for relatives. As for "important," I don't know if that figures in for me. It's a record of our past, and it's accessible when we feel like trippin' down memory lane, but that hasn't been lately. Too busy. That said, my mom found a box of my college and early wedding photos. Fun to flip through. And "people" in general probably won't think much of my photos. It's all just for me and mine.
I'm in favor of albums, even though they are more work. My mom has kept albums for years (I know this comes as a shock), and it is great to pull one off the shelf when I am home and page through it, and laugh at our weird hair or funny 80s clothes, or humorously somber-looking prom dates (ahem). :) And printing them also forces you to sort them and cull out the crummy shots, instead of keeping all 4 billion shots of the same thing on a disk somewhere.
The other thing I worry about is the files or programs becoming obsolete or unreadable. My parents have tons of Super 8 home movies and Betamax tapes, and we can't watch any of them. (We once paid to have some of the Super 8s dubbed to VHS. I suppose one of these days we should transfer *those* to DVD!)
Hi Tom,
I think the record store you're thinking of would be The Sound Garden in Fells Point. Wendy and I will be heading down to the Fells Point Festival this weekend, maybe we can take some pics for you.
Over the long run, I agree electronic storage is a good way to economically (space wise) to save pictures, and is more searchable than show boxes. I just like having books and such out to thumb through. I might be a bad case study on this kind of things; I'll probably never want to give up books for whatever cool media device finally comes along to replace them.
Aaron
Hi Tess!
Wow, this is a good topic...b/c I JUST passed the two year anniversary of getting a digital camera. And, um, I haven't printed pictures either or anything of that sort. Nor have I uploaded them to any sort of online site as a back up. They are all on my hard drive, on the original memory cards, or on my computer, or on disks, so that is probably enough forms of back up. But, the thought of going through two years of pics and printing them is overwhelming. Which, of course, makes me think I had better get on it sooner than later if I DO in fact want to make albums, b/c it's only gonna get more overwhelming with each passing year! UGH.
And, I too have a decade of pre-digital photos to deal with, not to mention all of the photos my mom hasn't touched from my growing up.
Where to start? And what IS the best way? And how to categorize? By date? By event? By people? By what??????? That gets me stumped every time!
If you solve this major dilemna...let me know will ya? :)
Next time you are in town give me a heads up and hopefull we can get together again! It was so great to see you, and I hope we catch up again soon!
Emily
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