Photo album or digital?

[Smurfette10]

Might be a strange question but we are living in a digital age. Do you still make up photo albums or do you just use social media?
Don't know wether to continue with prints and putting in an album for dd or just put photos on Instagram for her to look at when she's older? She is currently 18months

[Smurfette10]

Bump

[wonderlustt]

definitely continue with the prints, social media goes in & out of fashion so quickly but prints are permanent & I would definitely much prefer photos to hold, bit like the kindle/book debate, Book everytime for me, some things technology can not replace

[megletthesecond]

Prints here.

I've just framed a large collage of recent pics. So satisfying.

[Lweji]

Instagram when she's older.
Think about it. What was around 10, 20, 30 years ago?

[sniffle12]

I keep all my photos on my PC and back them up, and only print my absolute favourites.

I figure computer files are going to have at least some longevity - more so than social media sites which go in and out of fashion.

[affectionincoldclimate]

I make albums/print pics including the instagram pictures. Photobox has a great phone app (and website) that offers instagram prints 5 x 5 and 8 x 8 sizing - I often gift these as well. People LOVE them and often comment how nice it is to have prints. You can also design books which are gorgeous. I print pics/ books for grandparents and currently printing pics for baby book album which I am populating with pics and write ups as my pregnancy progresses. I find Grandparents in particular absolutely love and appreciate these as they show them to neighbours and visitors.

[thegoatwhogotthequiche]

I have kept them on my PC for the last 10+ years, now they are backed up in the cloud...my photos are safe all the time Microsoft is in existence (think I'm ok there...) and I can afford the annual subscription.

Any very favorites get printed off as pictures.

[TwatteryFlowers]

Actual printed photos with digital backups is much safer in my opinion.

I lost almost all the photos of my dc as newborns, babies and young children because my laptop decided to completely crash - I had to do a full factory reset. I hadn't backed them up. It was my own fault: I thought my computer was the backup - they'd been uploaded onto there from a range of devices (several old phones, an old camera, two new cameras with 3+ memory cards) because I was in the process of organising and cataloguing them and thought it'd be easier to keep them all in one place.

Even if you don't lose your images, if you take photos on a range of devices then organising and storing them can be a nightmare in itself and who is to say, in ten years' time, that your files will still be accessible? JPEG images degrade over time whenever they're saved and resaved and there is always the possibility of the data corrupting. Also, technology moves on and the devices and formats used today might very quickly become obsolete in the future - if you think about it, it was only 15-20 years ago that we were sitting things on floppy disk: how many people would be able to access the data stored on there now?

Take lots of photos, store them in several places such as on the cloud and in external hard drives and print out the best ones - those that you'd hate to lose. It's not difficult or expensive to do: there are loads of sites and apps where you can get your images made into prints or photo books straight from your phone and sent to your door for next to nothing.

[Writerwannabe83]

I print all my photos off. My DS has just turned three and I've got well over 1'000 photos of him in albums.

My friend's son died a few years ago (when he was aged 15months) and unfortunately in the same accident her phone was completely ruined and as a result she hasn't got any photos of her son except the newborns ones she had done professionally. It breaks her heart. She made me promise that I would always have photos of my son printed off and not just left on technology devices (mobiles and PCs etc) and so I have.

[WhyOhWine]

I do a photo book every year. Not with printed photos but like this:

support.apple.com/kb/PH19815?locale=en_US

I use iphoto to make my photobooks and it is easy and quality is good, although expensive, but there are various cheaper options such as photobox.

I love them. Much better than the albums for printed photos in my view. You can add text etc, although mine tend to be mainly photos.

I print a few photos to put on display and the DC also print some photos but we dont print that many. Apart from the books they are on computer, backed up in various ways (having learnt from an early mistake when I lost some by accidentally deleting).

[Smurfette10]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone
Il back up my laptop and print the nicer ones for a photo album too
writer how horrible for your friend. I'm so sorry. You don't think of that ever happening, heartbreaking to be left with no recent pictures