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Ask Slashdot: Best Option For Printing Digital Photos?
rrossman2 writes "With the birth of our son (who is now just over two), we have snapped and accumulated a ton of pictures — on Panoramio, Picasa, Facebook, etc. What is the best option for bulk printing the photos to a physical format? We all know how fast technology advances, as well as how fast sites come and go; I want a way to have these pictures for my son when he is older... just like my grandfather has photos of himself from World War II, my parents have photos of me when I was little, etc. Are there any affordable services that you can upload the photos to that print and deliver long-lasting pictures? How well do today's photo ink jets last, and what's the best type of paper? I do have a cheaper Samsung color laser printer, but color lasers don't make the most color-rich prints, and using normal photo paper you can find in big box stores doesn't work out too well, as the laser toner seems to peel off on the rollers and gum things up. (Is there a good long lasting paper that seems to work well with laser printers?) I can see what's going to happen in the future: all of the digital photos people take now are going to either end up on a website that won't be around in 20+ years, or get stuck on disks or flash memory that won't last, or for which interfacing with the media will become difficult or impossible."
I get mine done at Costco. Cheaper and better than any printer you can buy.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
My wife does a ton of stuff using Snapfish. The site seems slow as hell whenever I've been on it, but it works I guess. Upload all your pics, then order one print of each if you want.
I use Wal-Mart. You can pick up at the local store or have the mailed to destination.
Probably best to have someone print them for you.
If your son is two now the first thing they'd do as an adult presented with these old pictures is get online to find out what scanner to use to best get them into digital format where they belong.
Former long-time mini-lab technician here, the best quality and price is from good old Wal-Mart overnight services. They never have sales because the price is dirt cheap as it is, and the colors last a lifetime. The process is the same as traditional photo printing with the exception of using a digital exposure method.
I am not and never was a Wal-Mart employee, but that is where I take my photos when I choose to print them.
I used Costco (Canada) to have my digital pictures developed. Their online service is very simple to use, and you can even directly import your pictures from Facebook and Picasa. The prices are very reasonable, at 8 cents for 4x6. If you want more than pictures, they also turn your photos into photobooks, canvases, etc...
I've been using them for years and haven't had any issues whatsoever.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
If you're leaving your photos on flash-cards and websites in the first place, then that's your fundamental problem.
Save them to (redundant) disk locally, then commit them to a cloud backup service.
You do not have a son. You are a son, living in your mom's basement.
http://www.kodakgallery.com, kodak went bankrupt but they still make one the best prints at a competitive cost, go figures ...
... when you can make photo albums?! I find that we print photo albums instead of photos these days. Photos themselves are a nuisance to store or archive. Printed photo albums are nicely self-contained, easy to pack and look much better than those albums with a bunch of loose photos in it. It's really not much more expensive. I personally just use iPhoto to design and then print the albums. No hassle. Product is fantastic.
Of course there are many outlets to get these printed. I highly recommend them.
As a side bonus, your guests will think you're some kind of pro, cuz honestly, even with no experience, they come out looking really really good. Nothing says pro like a full page bleed :)
Then again, what do I know? I'm just an old fart with a 4 digit ID. ;)
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
Blurb has a lot of formats and prints a fantastic book, plus you can write out anecdotes or even pull in a blog or other documents. The layouts are highly customizable. When you are done, you have a book that family members can purchase also, or re-print if it gets damaged. The pictures are very high quality.
You can type all that out, but can't google search it so you have the answer right away?
http://millenniata.com/m-disc/
http://www.google.ca/search?q=m-disc
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
And they weren't printouts. They were actual developed 35mm film. Why go with physical photos when you can have the permance of a digital photo that never fades?
What you should be asking is: "How do I save my photos & videos so they don't get lost?" Backup to a USB drive in a fireproof safe. Backup to an online place like google. Backup to another online place like amazon. And make sure google/amazon are not in the same building (in case it burns down). That's what I would recommend.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Pick any of the online printers for a cheap price (snapfish, shutterfly, etc.), they are all about the same and will print with a quality photo processing machine on quality photo paper. Don't try to print any pictures you want to last at home. By the time you put enough money into it, you could have bought 5 copies of each of your other photos from a pro.
All that said, I would recommend only printing what you really want now (for frames, photo books, to put on the fridge, etc). Don't print them "to have a copy in 20 years". I do agree having a photo sharing site as the sole copy is a bad idea, but keeping them digital isn't.
I have all of our kid's photos on a computer at home (RAID 1 setup, but that may be too much for some to deal with), a second copy on a usb hard drive at home (for local backup), a third copy on a server I have in collocation (a similar solution would be mozy, carbonite, backblaze, etc.), and then the majority uploaded to Google Picasa for friends and family to view and order prints.
Sure, JPEG (what 99% of my photos are in) may not be around forever, but odds are, it isn't going to disappear overnight and I would much rather, in 10-20 year or whatever when JPEG goes away run some converting program overnight than deal with storing a bunch of shoeboxes of old photos.
Just keep your photos digital and put them on as many hard drives and in as many places as you can.
I last ran these numbers in February, 2012, so they might have fluctuated a bit, but the point still stands.
With a decent photo printer each photo will be at least 25 cents (20 cents for ink, 5 cents for matte paper). That doesn't figure in the cost of of the printer itself. A $100 inkjet will not do your prints justice, you'll be spending at least $500-$1000 for a decent one.
You're better off going with a 1-hour service at a warehouse store (Like Costco or Sam's Club) or other online services that offer shipment.
(Why doesn't Slashdot support the cent symbol?)
I can't see the point of this. People no longer keep horses for transportation, we hardly write things down (I've seen graduate research indicating handwriting is ceasing to be relevant), even our books are moving to digital. The proper question would be, "What is the most reliable storage medium for my digital photographs, assuming I need to access them in twenty years?"
This may be the first and only Slashdot story where Costco and Walmart are mentioned in positive light.
Dark Reflection
Depends on what you plan on doing with the picts when you are done. If you just want some cool picts to hand around easily.. go for the lowest price you can. Hand them out like Doritos. Munch all you want, we'll make more.
If you are planning on archiving them, then you will need to invest in a proper HP, Canon, or Epson printer using their archival grade inks (pH neutral) and archival grade paper (acid free). Then you then need to store them in an archival fashion. Black plastic archival envelope in a (more or less) temperature and humidity controlled environment. Under your socks in your drawer is actually a good place.
The on-line services are primarily geared towards low cost and quick turnaround. Some of them do have archival grade services (you need to check!). But, if you really want to make sure, do your research an do them yourself.
As for those that think digital is the way to go... yes and no. If you really, really, want to make sure it will still be there paper is still the only medium that has the longevity track record. Properly stored, centuries to millennium (or more) are not uncommon. Dead Sea Scrolls anyone?
There are many photo services that let you upload your photos and have them print them either ink jet or more often they do it on photo paper projecting the electronic image on the paper. NEVER use Shutterfly! While they say "unlimited access" that does not mean you can access your full resolution files with out paying for them!!! If you want your full res images keep them. I called them and they said there was not enough room on the website to give the details that would let the customer know about this snafu but too bad.
I don't know which photo sites, if any, still use ink jet/whatever printing type technolog, but the better ones certainly don't - the photos are created via a traditional chemical development of light sensitive photo paper (exposed via projection?). The longevity should be the same as an old fashioned analogue print.
http://www.blackriverimaging.com/index.asp
I'm not affiliated, but I use them almost exclusively. They are most certainly not the cheapest, but they are extremely reliable and produce *professional* quality prints. No membership/fees/other crap, and their customer service is top-notch. They use standard ROES software that's somewhat clunky, but you can knock out bunches of prints once you get the hang of it.
I should warn you, though, that it can get addicting. And their other products can get very tempting, very quickly.
You aren't going to get any serious life span from ink jet printers. I guess the top notch is pigment based but that comes at a cost. I've had pretty good luck with Wal-Mart and Costco photo printing provided the printers are maintained properly although I have no idea on the longevity of the images.
I do have a Canon Selphy photo printer to print one offs and hang tags Arts & Crafts projects, the tags we printed 7-8 years ago still look pretty good. Canon boasts a life span of close to 100 years for the Selphy printers but I'm a bit skeptical about that claim. One thing I really like about the Canon printer is it takes different size cartridges to print anything from a wallet size to post card and 4X6 although the cost per print is between 60 cents to a dollar, much more that what you will pay to get your images printed in bulk.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
Take your SD card to a kiosk at the photo lab. Print them and pay for them right there. I do it all the time for pictures that I like to tape on my wall. Quality is good enough and the prints are cheap.
Unless you are very rich and can afford a $40K printer, you want to have these done by a service. I don't know who has the best balance of price and quality right now, though, I just know you can't cheaply buy yourself good quality self printing.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
My used to get them printed at the Kodak Gallery on line, few hundred at a time. She makes a complaint and they either reprinted them or gave her a credit. Let's see what Shutterfly does.
www.itjerk.com
Owning your own color inkjet is a monumental waste of time and money(but at least the results are mediocre!). The cheapies provide fairly poor output and high consumables costs, even the nice units are going to require the fancy paper and a certain amount of babying to deliver results resembling your basic mini-lab photo prints.
As for which digital printing service, I'm less able to say. I had winkflash.com print 40 or so 8x10s a few years back, and they still seem to be in reasonable condition and the results, service, and price were all satisfactory. Snapfish.com is a fairly big name. My impression is that digital-source prints of quality comparable to sending 35mm film to your local pharmacy chain of choice are a fairly commodified market. 6 to 10 cents per 4x6, better initial results(especially on the glossies, if that is your preference) than you would get from a home printer; but no particular claims made about fading in N decades or other subtler factors.
If you want the really classy service, choosing from among the vendors who provide things like the option to download the ICC profiles for their equipment is probably a better bet; but I'm far too cost-sensitive and indifferent to tell you anything useful about the different ones.
I'd suggest a different forum- try dpreview
http://www.dpreview.com/search/forums?query=longevity&forum=1003
would be a good starting point.
Buying a photo printer is a waste of money - unless you're a professional photographer that has to do large prints often. And even then, most of the pro photographers I know farm out their printing. The best printers are just too expensive for a one man shop - the cost isn't justifiable. The printers that are less than $1,000 ust aren't as good as the $20,000+ printers that folks who specialize in photo printing may have.
I suggest that you shop around. Adorama, Wolf/Ritz, B&H Photo, Shutterfly, and places like that. And as far as snap shots are concerned, the FUJI dgitial/analog prints (digital enlarger on silver photo paper) has to b the best - up to 10x19" - over that, you're pretty much stuck with digital prints; even if you have film shots they will scan them and digitially print them.
I used solid ink printers for my prints, printed on acid free paper, placed in acid free archival fram under glass. it seems to be pretty stable afte several years. The advantage of this printer is that it will print on any flat paper.
A good inkjet printer, using pigment archival ink, is a reasonable choice for home use. It is not a cheap initial purchase, printer and ink is usually purchased separately, and this will be a dedicated machine. In any case this is sometimes how the Giclée prints are done, like the print on canvass offers one sees in the mall.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The usual place that talks about print permance is Wilhelm Research: http://www.wilhelm-research.com/ In general, the answer for home printing is the HP or Epson pigment printers with the appropriate papers, and UV blocking. However, I would tend to think that the only way forward is to backup the digital media, and backup early, backup often. You want the photos stored on your own backups that you control, stored as standard JPG images at full resolution. You want multiple backups, spread phsyically across different media and stored in different locations. You do want to think about cloud or other remote backups, in case something like Hurricane Katrina comes through and wipes out your whole town and surrounding area. In any backup system, you want to plan for at least every 5 years of recopying files from the old media to new media, as the media evolves.
I store my photos on a local NAS device in my home, but I am considering a cloud based service. I make periodic backups of the data using archive-grade DVD's that I send to various family members. When stored properly, archive-grade media should last 50+ years. Yes the technology changes, but most BluRay players are backward compatible with CD, a format that has been around for 20 some years, and will be around for the foreseeable future. For most people, it shouldn't be much effort to change formats, and re-archive your collection every 10-20 years, and/or move to a new data hosting service.
Printing could be the ultimate backup method, but it can get expensive, and hard to store. Sifting through shoe boxes of photos is time consuming. Also consider what happens if you have a second or third child. Do you now make doubles, or triples of all your photos? I think your kids would prefer a few disks of files, rather than a steamer trunk of paper.
Go to Mpix, or a similar vendor. I use MPix for a variety of reasons. They are fairly cheap, the paper is Kodak archival quality and the color's are far superior to any home "lab" printer you can purchase.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
It's not what you're looking for, in terms of bulk; but, in terms of Slashdot it's worth giving a nod to Fracture (http://www.fractureme.com/) They've got a pretty novel product what with printing on glass. I've been interested in trying them out to see what can be done with illumination of the glass for cool effect. Their prices also aren't really too outrageous either.
Just buy a good photo printer and do it at home. That way you retain total control of the pictures and the one of little Mary running around naked in the fireman’s hat after her bath will never get sent to the police. Besides by the time you need them to remember your eyesight will not really be able to tell quality.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
With quality DVD+/-R media available that can last 30 years or more, prints are NOT the way you want to preserve these memories. The best thing you can do is to cull your photos since digital photography typically results in way more shots than you will ever find a use for (hint: if you don't like a shot today, you are not going to be any fonder of it in 30 years). So keep your archive nice and trim. Then, go get two different brands of nice quality DVD DL media (since the only risk to optical storage is "bad batch syndrome", and make a backup of your archive on to a set of discs. Verify the backup. Put those discs in slim jewel cases, then in an airtight bag, and put that bag in a completely opaque, preferably sturdy container. Put that container somewhere safe. If you are really paranoid, make another pair and give them to a close relative like your parents for safe keeping. This will be around in about 25 years when your son is ready for them, and he can decide where they will live for the next generation.
Go to Adoramapix.com. They're a serious photography shop, so you can actually get your pictures to look the way you expect instead of with random color and contrast changes (which is my experience with other services). (They also offer a free "enhancement" service, but I haven't tried it.) Not quite as cheap as some of the other places out there, but still pretty reasonable, and they offer bulk discounts: 4x6s are currently $0.24 each, or $0.22 for over 100, or $0.1952 for over 1000 (you can buy a bunch in advance and get them printed over time).
seriously the only people who ask my wife and i to print photos are her mother and grandparents. i just email a few photos to my mom from my iphone from time to time
I have used SmugMug for photo sharing, one of the perks of sharing images with there site is the photo printing. I have always been impressed with their quality and shipping speed. Their prints might cost a bit more, but it seems to be worth it. I have also had prints made from Shutteryfly, Walmart, Walgreens. I normally use Walmart for when I need one hour prints done. The quality just doesn't seem to compare. I would also suggest making a Blurb/Shutterfly book. Either site has an easy way to create a book, which is a lot more interesting for people then prints.
mnewberg.com
There is an online service called WinkFlash, where you can directly upload your images and get printed photos back. The quality is excellent, shipping is fast, and you don't have to waste gas driving to a store. My parents used to order a lot from there until they discovered that just showing the pictures on the projector works better.
Every time I've done prints at local store, the color has been awful. Sometimes the image itself turns grainy. The prints I order through iPhoto are wonderful, though I haven't ordered in a few months. I believe they were using Kodak's service, which is getting handed over to Shutterfly?
It takes effort. Period. Why do you have photographs back from ww2? Because family expended the effort it took to keep them safe and sound all these years. That meant storing them properly, keeping them out of the hands of unsupervised kids, looking after them whenever family moved to a new home, etc. You simply have to do the same thing with your data. That means storing data redundantly on more than one format of physical storage. I would go with USB flash, micro sd and DVD rom all three. Then a decade down the road you may have to convert them over to new media of the day. No big deal. Regardless it will take effort, and if the data is important to you, then you'll expend that effort.
I have a comment about physical media. Why did the 3.5" floppy replace the 5 1/4"? Smaller form factor and greater data density. Why was PC Card (PCMCIA) flash / hdd replaced by Compact flash, which was replaced by SD, which is being replaced by Micro SD? Smaller form factor and greater data density. Well guess what. Micro SD is the pinnacle of small form factor. You cannot make it any smaller or else the average human simply cannot physically work with the media. In fact, there are millions of people that don't have good enough eyesight or motor control to work with Micro SD card sized media. My point in all this is all that is left to improve is data density and transfer rate. It is my opinion that micro sd is going to be around for a very, very long time. Barring some sort of proprietary format war (like Apple finally including removable storage in iOS hardware, but going with a new proprietary media) I don't see much improvement over the sd form factor, and so I think it's going to be with us for quite a while.
Better known as 318230.
I use Photobox ( http://photobox.com/ ) for this purpose. They are cheap and quick, but only in Europe. They also allow you to upload photos with FTP rather than some stupid application which is really really convenient!
Every man for himself, all in favour say "I"
Don't do it yourself. Purely in terms of cost of materials, you don't win by doing your own. On top of that, are you willing to put in the time and effort to calibrate the colours on your home printer properly, and keep it in calibration?
Costco / Walgreens / whoever - they all have Fuji Frontiers or something, and then it's all down to how well the machine is maintained. For quantity, you get a better price at a mail order service, where you're also less at risk from a random photo tech at your local Walgreens not knowing his job. If you're talking about hundreds of snapshots, the quality from any service should be fine.
For a little better quality, I've heard good things about mpix.com, but have never used them.
...mostly printers from Epson and Canon. Of course, the use high quality inks and paper.
For large pictures, almost all the photographers I know use an Epson 7700 series printer with Utrachrome inks. for smaller prints they seem to be split between the Epson and Canon printers. They use the higher-quality inks and paper.
Archival color photography has always been a problem. Ectacolor and Kodacolor degrade significant;y in only 20 years, quicker if exposed to heat or sunlight. Agfa and Fuji made the best commercial films and print for long-term dependency. Carbon prints were the absolute best, but difficult to master. (They were expected to degrade less than .01% in 200 years.)
Digital storage and digital printing is going to cause problems in the future. I know companies that used COLD to store their paperwork that are having problems recovering data from degraded media. I also know companies that are trying to get data off disks from CP/M drives. compatibility may be one of the next issues. I hope that Gold Archival discs live up to their reputation.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
And have them meet your son with the pics at a pre-defined location in the future?
I am not a crackpot.
If you have a Ritz or Wolf Camera nearby, I find that their prints are high quality. I used to take my film to them for processing and still use them for digital prints. They are more expensive than most, but if you print in bulk (100+) the price drops to be comparable to the other services. I share most of my photos online now, so I only print when I am updating my photo books, maybe once or twice a year. I have never had any of their prints fade and they have always reprinted bad prints, no questions asked.
One thing to keep in mind is the equipment that the photo shop uses. If they use Kodak equipment, your photos will turn out on the warmer side (oranges and reds have a little more contrast) whereas Fujifilm equipment tends to be on the cooler side (blues and greens have more contrast). My local Ritz uses Kodak equipment and produces warmer photos, which I prefer.
I've tried the local Walmart and Pharmacies, but the quality just isn't there. I just joined Costco, so I haven't had a chance to try their services.
You can find a roundup of photo services here: http://digital-photo-printing-review.toptenreviews.com/
As I go through my family's photo albums, I ask myself - where are the negatives for the missing pictures/empty spaces in the album(s)? gone.... Also do other family members have any print copies of long lost photos of yester-year? Nope... and if I wanted to watch an old video of family and friends from before digital conversion corrupted the file(s), is there a video player (i.e. VCR, Beta, VCD, DVD, Blueray, Data crystal, etc) that is also downward comparable view them (to what level)? All these questions are crossing my mind - my only solution right now is - Print digital copies on Kodak prints and hold on to that shoe box... 5X7, 8X10 and 3X5 for future proof scanning... any other method is a waste of time.
Preferably on a Fujifilm Crystal Archive or Kodak Endura Paper. These are protographic prints, not cheap inkjet or dye sublimation prints. If the minilab is correctly set up and uses good quality chemicals (preferably from Fujifulm, if printing on a Fuji paper, or from Kodak, if printing on Kodak paper), the prints should last a lifetime. Fuji's Crystal Archive is rated for 60 to 70 years.
I used to have my prints done at Black's (Canada), on some Kodak matte photo paper; not Endura, for I didn't have the money, but a reasonable quality paper on a reasonable quality minilab. None of them have shown any signs of fading to the present date.
If you really need the pictures to last 100+ years, take them on Ilford B&W film; if you get a good film camera, it's not harder than taking a digital picture (I have a Pentax MZ-50 SLR , which can work fully manual or all-auto, and I rarely set it to manual). Buy a film scanner (Nikon Coolscan) and scan the film. If you need prints, have them done from the film. Store the film in a cool, dry place, away from any light sources.
If you go the Costco/Walmart/CVS or other public kiosk route, do NOT take your SD card or USB stick. There have been reports of those machines being infected with viruses, which you don't want to bring home with you. Burn to CD or DVD to take to the store.
Have you tried telling your print driver that it is using thicker/different paper than regular paper? Most have a photo paper option. When printing stickers on my laser, I tell the driver that I am using card stock, the heaviest weight defined in the print driver. It prints much more slowly as it spends more time on the fuser, but it stops the peeling/flaking issue.
I have digital pictures going back about 10 years now. 10's of thousands of them. And video. I don't delete pictures, I copy them to my computer, check them into Subversion and then edit if needed and commit again so the completely unaltered file is available. My subversion repositories are all backed up on a regular basis to an external drive. All the directories are year / year-month and occasionally toss in the day and a descriptive line if it's a special event.
Terabyte drives are moderately priced. Setting up Apache with Subversion isn't too terribly difficult. And any desktop PC will work as a server. With broadband you get a public IP so you can check in photos / video from anywhere you happen to be. All you need is one good flash card for the camera and then download and commit when you need space or don't want to risk the flash drive crapping out.
Keeping photos available is more about having a good system to organize them than the file format or current storage options. File formats aren't going away. If you really are worried though, just save them as BMPs. Uncompressed, straightforward file format that requires pretty much no effort to write a reader for.
Work Safe Porn
Your kid isn't gonna care much about the dozens of albums and thousands of pictures. I've inherited both formats and I guess I kept less than 1%. My wife tries to keep everything but the kids have their own memories, digital by and large. I doubt they print anything except for us older folk. When we die, they will just want to get rid of the junk, their lives are too busy so I'd suggest you do some selection for them.
Do we know what will last as well as the 140 year old family portrait hanging upstairs? No. Nor did they back then.
I use Snapfish and Walmart or Walgreens prints em. Used Costco and was pleased but they are further away. Also I find it easier to do the uploading and culling from home as opposed to standing at a kiosk in a store. The ones I think the kids will be interested in I send now to them digitally so they are in two places. I do printing to humor my wife. She creates scrapbooks, probably has thousands invested in them by now. I try to flush a good portion of the camera's contents before sending them all on for printing. It isn't the cost which has me selecting, but the waste. The only reason I do home printing is for the immediate one off she wants to give to someone today. Bulk is always done via a service.
My Epson printer uses waterproof ink and does not run or bleed and supposed to last for 100 years.
Print up to 8 x 10
Create real books with Blurb.com or competitors.
Create a movie slideshow using iPhoto or similar products.
Keep your photos in a drive by themselves, with a backup offsite, maybe a family member's home, or a safety deposit box. Spot check the backup to ensure the images are displayable.
Print out as negatives
Coat a sheet of stainless steel with photo-sensitive film
Do a contact-print onto the stainless
Coat the unexposed areas with acid resist
Acid-treat the stainless.
Viola! Permanent Black and White print.
Or you could just leave the things alone.
Either way in twenty years you'll look at three quarters of those photos and go "who/where/when was this again?"
I can't quote their rates for large format or bulk print jobs, other than that I remember they are cheap, but I love their print on demand kiosks... I walk in, connect to the kiosk from my android via bluetooth (you can also use CD/DVD, all types of memory card, USB keys, etc) and I'm back out 5-10 minutes later with immaculate looking 4x6's, for something like $0.32 per print. It especially good to print glossy colors of drawings I've done in Sketchbook mobile.
Just because you have tons of digital pictures doesn't mean you need all of them in a physical format. The plus side of digital is that you can take as many pictures as you want because they don't cost anything. If it doesn't turn out, delete it.
I would recommend taking the best/favorite pictures and getting those printed commercially. A small photo album is a lot better than boxes of unsorted photos.
A similar recommendation would be a selection of pictures in a digital picture frame. Again you're choosing the ones you like best and displaying them.
Honestly think about how often you'll be looking back at those pictures. 50 photos of your son's first birthday party aren't going to be that interesting in 20 years. A few photos for family memories are a lot more likely to be treasured.
Back to the original question - any place that prints digital on photo paper with dye sub will work fine.
I recently went through several boxes of old family photos and digitized them. I learned a number of things in the process.
There are/were vast differences in the quality and longevity of different photo printing methods. Most of the photos that were about 50 years old had faded and color shifted, each, it seems, in its own peculiar direction. Trying to bring them back to proper color was a nightmare, not made easier by my lack of skill with Gimp. But some of the photos from 50 years ago looked like they might have been printed last week. The colors were still vivid. I have no idea what process was used on any of these prints, but it was very clear the process makes a world of difference.
Whatever you decide to do with the prints, I strongly recommend getting some archival quality sleeves to individually store them. Even if you then put them in an album, put them first in archival sleeves. The prints will be protected and will never again be exposed to fingerprints. They won't get scratched. They'll be reasonably well protected against UV fading. Then lock it all in a light-proof vault. Light is the mortal enemy of photo prints and even good quality UV protection will still allow some small amount of UV to penetrate. Keep the prints in a tightly sealed box and you should have few problems with fading.
Honestly, though, if you really care about preserving these for posterity, just keep them digital and use some kind of offsite backup. Know going in that you'll probably have to move them around several times over the years as companies come and go and technology changes. You may well have to convert them to different formats at more than one point. But the digital copy is almost certainly going to be more flexible and of better quality than any print.
that prints using REAL silver on REAL photo paper, not those stupid inkjet or dye-sub prints you get at wal*mart....
if you pay $0.25/4x6 or less, you're a cheap bastard who is getting ripped off....
i use http://www.tricolorlab.com
I use Blurb which lets you print photos into book forms with a range of cover and paper options.
Organization may be the most important thing you can do with your photos, whether you print them or not.
Digital photos are easy to lose if you don't have a good plan setup. Consider an organization tool, or at least a good directory structure, making good use of exif tags for captions, dates, etc. If you're talking prints, don't keep them in shoeboxes - put them in proper albums, with good labels.
By doing this, you've made them easy to share, and easy to search. Additionally, because you've gotten in the habit of regularly organizing new photos (ideally within a week or so of taking them), you are by extension ensuring that old ones stay accessible.
I agree with others that digital is really the way to go for the long term. As long as you move the old ones to each iteration of your hard drive (and a backup in the cloud), you won't have to worry about them being stuck on an obsolete storage media. (In other words, don't just "archive" the old ones.)
Disclaimer: I have taken a lot of 35mm photos of my Daughter, this being before Digital was available. My Dad took a lot of 35mm over the years of Family, multiple Trips to Europe, Houses they built, their many gardens, when he first moved to California in late 30's, time in WWII and more.
Fast forward to today. Mom is 89 and has Alzheimer's. She recognizes virtually none of the photos taken over the years. Dad who is 92 and who had a mild stroke, just could care less. He has his hands full with Mom. Plus his memory has been affected and he cannot recall all the subjects.
I can recognize some, by process of elimination. But few are in albums [there are plenty of blank albums that were to be filled]. Most have nothing written on them, so when they pass, most of the photos will be put in the Trash.
For my Daughter's Photos, I have scanned the "best" and made prints, with notes. She will have some to look at when she is older but not "thousands". Those that I identify from my Parents I will make notes and have available for her in digital and hard copy.
I did come across a box full of very old photos from the late 1800's and into the 1940's, but again I cannot identify most of the subjects. Those I will keep, as I have seen many in Antique stores being sold for $5.00 and up as accent pieces. Plus if I get together with cousins, maybe we can identify some of them.
The moral I am trying to get across is to identify each and every photo in some way, otherwise they are worthless. Even if they have exif data. Plus too many are overwhelming.
By far the best.
National Camera Exchange & Video if you are in the Midwest
http://natcam.com/natcamera/
Honestly, unless you're willing to shell out the $$ for a pro-level printer and paper, it's cheaper to use an online service. I would avoid the Walmarts and Costcos, though I'm sure their service is fine, but I personally use and recommend White House Custom Color (www.whcc.com). Get on their mailing list for occasional discounts. Haven't done anything in bulk with them, though.
While there have been many good suggestions, there is also a recent technology where you can burn a DVD to last 1000 years. The dvd isn't subject to the chemical degradation of a normal DVD over time. I think using this to produce some archive-able storage of your photos would compliment your other storage options.
Check it out at: http://store.millenniata.com/index.php/
Before you bulk print, save yourself some money and your son a load of tedium when he's older, and weed out the dross. I've noticed that I've taken an absolute ton of photos of my kids, just because I can, it doesn't matter with digital photography and it gives better odds of a good shot. But I'm pretty bad at weeding out the crap, and from what I've seen so are most other people too. I have probably 10 great photos from my childhood, up to about 15 or so, and a few more that aren't very good but reflected important moments. So those 10 or so photos are greatly treasured. If they were hidden among a thousand more terrible ones I probably wouldn't care a damn about any of them, even the good ones. My parents were great at weeding, and I thank them for that. If you really want to give your son a great photographic gift, give him less - by taking the time and effort to weed out the rubbish. Or if you can't be objective enough yourself, see if you can get a brutally honest friend to help out.
Fetches your online photo collection, offers you some options on layout and you get high quality (profesional printing) picture books delivered to your door.
I think they have much better photo albums.
i've had many pictures printed at Walmart. I upload and then pick up... fast and cheap.
http://www.hawknest.com/
This isn't necessarily archival (the people at Clark Little Photography say the results will fade if exposed to sun), but if you get MetalPrints at http://www.bayphoto.com/metalprints/single/index.htm , the results are incredible. The backing is treated aluminum, and the photos have wide apparent dynamic range. (I haven't tried measuring them.)
As far as we know, modern inkjet prints can be extremely long-lasting, based on accelerated testing. If you pop for a high-end printer, e.g. Epson 3880, you can make really good prints that will (probably) last decades. High-dollar printers, in my experience, don't have the problems that cheap inkjets do. They're much more durable even if you don't use them that often, but you probably should use them regularly.
But then you're off in the rabbit hole of display/printer calibration (non-trivial), ICC profiles, $500 to refill the inks, etc. Each print will probably cost several dollars. It's probably not worth it for most people. But if you're going to buy your own, save yourself a lot of frustration and get a really good printer (and IPS monitor).
I've had good luck with MPix for making high quality prints. Others are probably good also.
I have no idea how long photo books last, but there are a lot of them out there. I've had good luck with MyPublisher and Blurb for prints that look like what I sent them.
So, aside from keeping multiple digital backups, verifying them regularly, off-site storage of backups, and updating formats over years, which presumably you would do anyway, do this:
Print the photos you like best on archival inkjet paper and put them into an archival box. Take notes of who, what, where, when. Reference the original digital file. That has as good a chance as anything of lasting a few decades.
A good discussion is here at TOP, and read the comments too.
If your camera has the capability to shoot raw, do it. I don't need to go into a huge essay as to raw vs JPEG but you'll get more out of your photos when tweaking them in Photoshop or light room. Also, store and index your photos properly. digital can be forever, don't rely on the cloud.
How do you think photo gallery photographers print their works? They get a better printer than the department stores sell, that uses archival ink and paper. 100 year print life is easily achievable with a semi-pro or pro printer from Epson or Canon. For Epson, it's ultrachrome K3 inks (and some others, now).
If the poster doesn't want to go through the learning curve of decent printing (it's a bitch), then go to a camera shop and tell them what you want. If you go to a department store, the worker bees don't even know what kind of paper and ink they use.
Canon claims 200+ years lifespan for their archival quality paper and ink, but it's going to cost you a bundle.
http://www.opticsplanet.net/canon-pro-platinum-photo-paper-8-5-x-11-20-sheets.html
Archival quality DVD-R or even CD-R is probably a better bet in the long run. Those formats are so pervasive now that they probably won't just up and die for a very long time.
Dye sublimation seems to give the best results. This is what the best-quality service providers will use to give you prints that last 100 years (in theory). If you really want to do some of these at home, Canon makes some small DyeSub printers, such as the Canon Selphy series (check their website) that print to special paper using a multi-pass process where the last pass is to lay down a plastic film on the page. Once this is done you can literally pour water over the pictures and it just runs off (although I wouldn't submerge them). The only downside is cost. The printers are inexpensive but the dye & paper kits are around $40 (in Canada anyways) for 108 prints. This means you can get them done by a large service provider for less. I have a number of dental offices in my client list that use these to produce a high-quality image from an intra-oral camera to give to a patient considering services such as implants.
Officially a geek since 1984
Why can't we just answer the asker's question?
Describe the goal, not the step -- ESR
Some people read the question as "How do I do $step?", infer a most likely goal from the described step, explain why that step isn't optimal in one's own opinion, and propose alternate steps to achieve the same goal.
If you really care, this is a very serious issue, and should not be taken lightly. Just going to your friendly Costco, etc. is NOT a long-term solution.
I have many photos around, slides and prints in a variety of formats, collected by my family over more than 80 years. And the bad news is that the most stable versions are all from Kodak - hence the chance to get equivalent new ones is apparently going to disappear because Kodak was too slow to adapt to digital. I have 50 year-old Agfa and Fujitsu slides which are hopelessly gone; and 70 year-old ones of my grandparents from the earliest Kodachrome which are still pretty good.
For prints, the situation isn't much different.
My advice: Upload to Kodak while you can, and get their best quality. They're not even expensive. You'll be able to see the difference from Costco even now, and you will have a fighting chance that the photos will last 50 years.
I tried their print services a few years back, based on tons of recommendations.
BLECH
their colors were off. I got better results on my calibrated inkjet Epson Photo Printer. (admittedly a professional-grade printer). I also got better paper options when i chose my own paper.
The archival qualities are great on my Epson, too. they don't fade, and aren't expected to fade for 200 years.
If you're investing in a big project, like say thousands of photos, you're probably better off getting your own high-end inkjet photo printer.
Find a local print shop that specializes in fine art archival printing (hint: you can ask around for "giclee" specialists [jick-lay], which literally means "putting droplets of ink on a substrate", but has become a printing industry buzzword for "high-end" artistic printing).
I'm sure they'd love the business, and inkjet output is brilliantly beautiful compared to the grubby old light sensitive paper at your local photo lab, and you have more options for the medium, anyway.
Hell, I could even print them for you and ship them, if you wanted; probably 40% of my business comes from professional photographers, who turn around and triple my pricing for their own clients. Just be prepared to print a bunch; larger shops can charge much less per print if their yields are better. Sounds like you're ready for this, though.
Dr. Margaret Hedstrom, whose career is all about preserving digital information, says "...digital preservation remains largely experimental and replete with the risks associated with untested methods".
1. How to keep digital copies.
You want a copy online somewhere and a copy on your computer.
Stay away from sites like Facebook which downgrade your photos to save space, or don't let you easily download the originals in bulk.
Dropbox and Google's PicasaWeb are good options. I used to keep my photos on my own private server, but the disk on that thing will die some day...
Also, every year or so, I burn everything onto a DVD. (I start with the most recent stuff until I run out of spac
For printing, you're provably best off having it done professionally.
This might be helpful. From the website, it indicates long print life too.
Based on 200+ years display permanence rating by Wilhelm Imaging Research Inc. using six-ink HP Vivera pigment inks on supplied HP photo paper.
http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/509170-0-0-225-121.html
When I got my first digital camera I sent about $10 worth of the same images to two vendors (Snapfish and Kodak) then I compared the results. /Ed
Kodak won hands down. I could have tried a larger set of services. Kodak had a scenario where you could pick up the prints at CVS or Walgreens with no shipping charges, but that ended I think. So you may want to take into account how to avoid shipping.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye-sublimation_printer
If you want to do it yourself a dye sublimation printer that uses CMYO (Cyan Magenta Yellow Overcoating) on specialty acid free paper is probably your best option. The overcoat makes that face water proof and the overcoat has stabilizers and UV blockers in it. I have been impressed with the quality of the ones I've printed. They are expensive, the supplies are expensive so unless you're going to do thousands of prints they're probably not economical.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Just don't use shutterfly. They sold my email address to a spammer. I know this because I always use company_name@mydomain.com when signing up for services. All "unknown" addresses on my domain are forwarded to my normal POP inbox. So, when I started receiving offers to enhance various parts of my anatomy, from shutterfly@mydomain.com, I knew THAT THEY'RE A BUNCH OF LOUSY BASTARDS!!!
Basically, UV, acids, and our atmosphere, especially in cities, is hostile to colours we use in images. Look at the faded signs as well as faded photos. But print on non-acid paper, with inert pigments rather than fragile organic dyes, and keep the air out with a sealed frame or box, and you can expect hundreds of years of stable colour life.
So print it yourself (Canon and Epson have pigment inks on some photo printers) on no-acid paper and matte it under glass (UV protection), keep it out of the sun, and enjoy. (Not against the glass- it will stick. That's why the matte.)
If you're storing photos away, make sure the environment is all non-acidic, too, eg, metal boxes not cardboard or plastic.
Cost-wise, look for processors who advertise no-acid paper and pigment inks.
See http://www.wilhelm-research.com/ for the most comprehensive look.
Epitaph: At last! Root access!
I'm going to go the other direction form Costco and sugest MPix. They do wonderful high quality prints on good paper with 100 minimum life expectancy. They are of course more expensive, and while they will do bulk 4x6's this is not the best choice of when to use them. Instead pick 20 good pictures print them at 8x10 or larger put them in nice frames and hang them on the walls. 1000's of digital images never get looked at. and it will be years before you know which ones are really important. For now just print a few to enjoy while preserving the image on something besides 1's and 0's.
This strategy will protect you to varying degrees against fire, natural disaster, failure of digital media, bankruptcy of online services, bit rot, password loss, and just about everything else, but it's a lot of work.
I make these "yearbooks" once a year, plus a book for significant birthdays and anniversaries, major travel, and other big events. I store on two photo services and an online backup service, and I have local online copies on RAID, a backup on another RAID, and a third RAID at a separate physical location, updated monthly via rsync.
I don't see as anyone has really addressed what seems to be one of the core issues, longevity of the prints. Good silver-based prints last many decades, as we've seen; I don't know about modern digital technologies, but it's a question worth asking - how long does a print last, and what's the best kind of print to get if you want it to last?
For all the people that thought you shouldn't bother to make prints, and just to keep your photos digitally, I'd have to strongly disagree. Having a "thing" that you can keep and give to someone, put in a box, or on the wall -- it's worth so much more than having a file you can keep or lose track of. I'm not very organized, so I've lost most of the photos I've ever made, but the ones that are actual prints become treasures, and the ones on old hard disks or cd's just end up in stacks of hold hard disks and CDs.
When I'm visiting someone, I really love going into town to get a stack of prints made to give as gifts. It's cheap and quick and always appreciated.
I asked Brian K. Reid this question and he wrote me a nice letter explaining how he just dismantled his darkroom and got an Epson printer because of the quality of their inks, which are archival grade and are said to last over 100 years. More so, they're unbelievably color fast; he did a test where he printed the same image twice then put one though a dishwasher and compared and there was absolutely no difference.
I can't find this email now (and that bothers me, I thought I had all of it back to 86) and if it's crucial I can ask Brian to send me another copy, he does a better job of keeping all his email than I do.
I did find these snippets from later conversations on the same topic and hope they're of some use.
------------
I just ditched my darkroom about a year ago. I sold all of the equipment and materials to a fellow in Adelaide, Australia. Now I use Lightroom and Photoshop and giclée printers. I can make much better prints, much faster, without the foul chemical smells. And what's better, I actually do it instead of just talking about it.
I kept enough equipment to develop 35mm and 120 film, but if I ever develop any I will scan it in at 4000DPI and then use Lightroom.
If you don't believe that giclée (inkjet) prints are as good or better than silver gelatin prints, send me an image file and a mailing address and I'll make a print of your image on my Epson 3800 and send it to you. B&W or color. I'll use this paper:
http://www.museofineart.com/museosilverrag.aspx
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Printers become vastly more expensive to buy and maintain if they print on
wider paper. The 2200 prints on 13-inch-wide paper.
The Epson Artisan 50 at CDN$99 new will probably have a lower lifetime cost of
ownership than a used R1800 or R2200. And it makes great pictures. Printing
enlargements to hang in an art museum is not the forte of the Artisan 50, but
it does better prints than any local store will do.
Epson is not stupid, and they only make their best inks (the K3 series)
available with their more expensive printers. The cheapest printer that uses
K3 inks is the R2400. The R2200 uses the previous generation of pigment inks
(Ultrachrome) which are getting harder to find and whose prices are going up.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Having heard the warnings about Epson printers clogging up, I still bought a yard sale 13" wide Epson Photo 1280 ($5) and I purchased a set of inks ($66).
My thinking has been to look really closely at the clogging problem, and search the web for other clogging problem results. The clogging problem could be solved and then I could do quality color printing at home.
I hear the advice "go to Costco" quite loudly. It strikes me that something is really wrong about the personal inkjet printer business when virtually everybody commenting here is essentially saying home printing of quality color photos does not work.
The printhead has a bunch of .002" diameter holes, maybe 48 of them, maybe spaced 1 mm apart in staggered rows. When just one of those holes plug up, then a color print begins to show horizontal bands of no-ink.
So far, I have made a cotton twill device for wiping the bottom of the printhead. It does not work very well.
Just for laughs, suppose one had a printer test utility that would show exactly which ink-jet holes are plugged? The same page could print out a map of the printhead showing rows, columns, dimensions and colors on the bottom of the ink-jet unit. The test page could organize cleaning work by showing which row and which column is not squirting ink.
The really valuable trick would be to test and clean individual ink jet orifices without disassembling the printer.
Now what is needed is an alignment jig and a cleaning tool for cleaning exactly one print head ink jet orifice at a time. The alignment jig could be a piece of electronics perf board or a drilled plate. The cleaning tools would be a wet cotton swab and a suction or water pressure device using 1 mm diameter vinyl tube.
It would be really nice if Epson would publish the command language for addressing the print head and carriage machinery.Then you could send the printer a command like "move the printhead so ink-jet number 3 in row 4 is 90 mm from the left edge of the printer. That position lines up with the handy dandy alignment jig. You just thread the cleaning swab up, wet the crusties, then send the printer a command to fire number 3 in row 4 and find out if the opening has cleared.
The moral of the story is: I would love to fix the inkjet printer and I wish Epson would do the quality thing of publishing the control codes and print head dimensions to enable writing a diagnostic program and fabricating a cleaning jig. The umteen million dollar failure of quality home color printing could be greatly eased if Epson would do the right thing and disclose the control language for addressing the printer at the single inkjet level.
If you got loads of money and stacks of disposable fine paper, print at home. In any other case, print elsewhere.
Home printing is an enlightening experience, but a hard and incredibly expensive one.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
If you want your prints to last use one of the big online printing services, do a little research, if they are any good they will tell you what machines and paper they use. for example PhotoBox in the uk use printers that expose traditional photographic paper, and they use archive quality paper for it. so those prints should last just as well as previous generations of photo did.
http://www.photobox.co.uk/content/quality/technical
Sure, you can get a USB to RS232 converter. How many non-geeks have one?
Probably few, but they're easy to find online or in stores. Start by searching for usb rs232 adapter on Google Product Search. I used to work at a warehouse that used Windows Mobile PDAs with a built-in laser barcode scanner to run an internal warehouse automation app. Initial loading of the early versions of the app happened over an RS232 connection to the scanner's dock. Is your worry that non-geeks won't know what to tell the salesperson even if an online guide refers to a "USB to RS232 adapter with a DE9 plug" and has a picture of the plugs to expect, like this PC to TV hookup guide?
Would the drivers for your RS-232 drive (probably made for DOS or Amiga or Apple II) still be available and work on today's hardware/software?
People are still making drivers to access the SOS file system used by Apple II ProDOS. So as long as adapters for the physical layer remain available (e.g. USB to RS232 converters), and the wire protocol is documented, some Linux geek is likely to have written a tool that makes mounting such a drive as easy as mounting any other storage.
I'm not sure about yellowing over time compared to regular prints, but I've used 3M's Print to Last paper in laser printers with great success. The stuff is durable, holds the toner, and laughs at water. It's about $0.50 per sheet, but beats lamented paper when in a wash down duty factory environment. A few of the prints were hung outside, and didn't fade hardly at all. The fading I would think has a lot to do with the toner too though.
Hello- I have used webshots.com as one form of backup for my sons images. I have been adding images for free for over five years with few to no problems. Video's too although webshots degrades the quality of those. They give you more space as you upload more files. I suppose they print in mass as well from that site but I am using an HP 9600 series with the extra color gradient. I also print them on Kodak 'archival grade' paper which is supposed to last over a hundren years. All I can attest to though is they have not degraded in five years. Hope this helps ahd have fun taking those pictures. I view mine often and am glad I took the time to upload them all. good day, moss-
It is what it is.
Upload or email to https://www.picplum.com/ - they print your photos and ship them to your friends & family.
First: completely agree that it's (much?) cheaper and more or less as good to get prints from Costco et al.
Second: should you want to do it yourself, the crucial difference is whether the printer uses dye sublimation technology. The Canon Selphys are the cheapest-and-best-at-the-price that I've come across. Buy archival photo paper to feed it, and you have your own set up for under $200.
I've been doing a tiny test by putting a few prints on the fridge which gets direct sun for a few months of the year. They've been there for five (six?) years now and have only just started showing a tiny bit of fading. In an album, they'd be fine for decades at that rate. The ink-jet prints (HP Deskjet? Canon something?) I had up for comparison faded to very bleached-looking in less than a year.
I feel obligated to mention these guys. I wrote the image processing workflow software they use. (They also do the printing and framing fulfillment for the framed paper and canvas products for some of the other big image print players mentioned in other posts above, but I can't tell you which ones.)
http://www.pictureframes.com/editions/faqs.html#protect
Has anybody ever heard of ExposureManager? One of my friends use them and said you can upload full resolution or resize them. There isn't a free account but he also said print prices were quite reasonable and professional. I've heard good things about Costco too but idk really, just thought I would mention my 2.
Bayphoto offers a range of print products on various media. Their prints are all on archival paper and can be laminated if you are worried about age deterioration.
Keep them on disk, *but* keep backing them up to your latest disk, and make sure the format is something you can still view, and hopefully edit. When that test fails, update the format. Cloud backup might be good for offsite protection.
Your father's and grandfather's photos are as crisp and clear as when they were new..
Rule of thumb: stone tablets with backups for anything important.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
...what we pay at Snapfish, one of their frequent "specials". I suppose it's a loss leader for ther ridiculous large prints, mugs, etc.
Personally, I really like and prefer high quality pigment ink-jet prints on glossy paper for their unbeatable image quality. However, it is not necessarily easy to get consistent high quality results.
For practical archive purposes, I would recommend using a good photo book service, such as iPhoto, Shutterfly, SmugMug, Snapfish, or MyPublisher. You can get a high quality (offset-printer quality) bound book with your photos and any descriptive text you want. Since it is pigment based ink, the images should last a long time, assuming the book is treated properly. Creating the books is generally a non-trivial effort, but the results I have seen can be amazing.
I also cannot over-stress the importance of maintaining you digital originals, and ensuring proper offsite backup. I cannot tell how many friends have lost their whole family photo archive to fire, theft, or simple hardware failure. Note that many of these concerns apply to both hard copy AND digital copies. So make backups of both digital and hard copy images!
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