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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.
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.
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.
... 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. ;)
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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.
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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
The whole question is pretty silly really.
You have digital photos printed in the same places you would have had film developed 10 years ago. The transition to digital really didn't change much in that regard.
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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
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.
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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
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
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).
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.
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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"
You do not have a son. You are a son, living in your mom's basement.
How do you know he doesn't ALSO have a son of his own, living in the basement's basement? I hear that it's basements all the way down.
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.
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.
You have to be very careful with dye-sub work. First off, there's two kinds. One is "inkjet" printing that uses gaseous colorants to create the image, and the other is simply printing onto a transfer medium and then using a heat press to imprint the image.
The first is commonly used for things like name badges (we actually have some printers here that do it) or photos, and yes, dental and medical images, but the process is often limited in available classic substrates (canvas, luster photo paper, etc). That little Kodak kiosk thing that may be at your local Wal-Mart can claim it's this kind of "dye-sub", so they're not all created equally. The second type is useful for printing onto dimensional objects, or objects that cannot be fed through an inkjet, but you lose saturation during the transfer process. A shop using "dye-sublimation" can claim either of these, and not be very good at it in any case.
As for as longevity goes; this is ALWAYS a function of the colorant and substrate you use, aggravated by the conditions you store the output in, and has little to do with the original process of getting the color to the substrate (solvent, UV, and Latex applications excluded; by their very natures these inks attach to the substrate more aggressively).
Generally speaking, dye inks (colored solutions) will fade fastest (magenta first, in most cases, and that sucks because dye inks are typically the most vibrant), pigment inks (solutions with wee little colored flakes in them) will fade more slowly, solvent inks (more aggressive pigment inks) more slowly still, with latex and UV inks typically tied for the slowest, depending on substrate. All substrates must be acid-free, too, or you're hosed, as the substrate itself will start to yellow, fade, and break down as UV accelerates the process. There are also ways to protect any existing or brand new print regardless of the ink used; check out the way the Library of Congress does frames and archives their prints and paper items for a good idea on how it's done: http://www.loc.gov/preservation/care/mat.html / http://www.loc.gov/preservation/care/paper.html respectively. It's a pain in the ass, but following true standards always is.
Basically, take what a manufacturer of a printer, paper, or ink says about longevity with a grain of salt; the requirements for Epson, Kodak et. al. to say "will last 75 years!!" are lax to the point of ridiculous. I'm not blasting them; especially Epson, as I have 4 of their printers and they truly ARE absolutely amazing. It's just that there IS no standard for testing print permanence, so anybody can claim anything: "If you leave your prints in a lightless vacuum in extreme deep space, it'll last for a kajillion years!!!" Well, duh.
For instance, this is Epson defending their testing practices against Kodak's, while admitting that their own are not very realistic (and it's an amusing public gripe, to boot): ftp://ftp.epson.com/webfiles/whitepprsum.pdf. A shamelessly cherry-picked quote:
"Currently there is no ISO print permanence standard for digitally printed photographs, and there is no prediction as to when, or even if an ISO standard will be established."