Since the advent of the camera, photographs have become something of a commodity. Everyone walks around with a camera in their pocket these days, and people forget about photos as quickly as they’re taken.
Printing photos transforms them into something else — something tangible and special. There’s a kind of magic here, something that changes a digital snapshot on a tiny screen into something else, a memory that you can hold in your hand.
How printed photos are used is different too. Instead of being uploaded to social media, they can be displayed in the house, gifted, or stored away like a secret. While albums might have been the quintessential way to collate your pictures in the past, it’s the photo book that takes the crown these days. Read on to find out why.
Object Permanence
While digital storage has the benefits of speed, security, and essentially limitless size, it does come with some downsides. In fact, the size itself can be an issue. Files can get lost, fast. Despite any measures taken to organise and sort, sometimes the sheer volume of digital media can overwhelm you.
Printing a selection of the very best pictures from your social feeds can help you set them apart from the rest. Bestowing them with physicality and object permanence, forever marking them as particularly important to you and ensuring they never get lost in the digital expanse.
Once you’ve selected the photos you want to elevate from mere social media posts, check out www.mysocialbook.com, who offer an all-in-one printing and publishing service directly from the photos on your social feed.
Get Creative
Compiling a selection of pictures into a photo book offers the chance to express yourself creatively in a way that social media doesn’t. Through careful and considered curation of your photos, you can build a narrative that will be told through your book, with pictures reflecting themes, meanings and emotions.
This can be as simple or as a deep and symbolic as you like. Maybe your book tells a straightforward story of a trip overseas, or maybe it’s a far more introspective collection of pictures, with hidden meanings known only to you.
The Perfect Gift
While a photo book might be an excellent present for yourself, to commemorate a life event such as a holiday or a graduation, for example, they also make for fantastic gifts for friends and family. Personal gifts are always a crowd pleaser, particularly when older relatives like parents or grandparents are involved. Include pictures of kids, grandkids, or pets to make your gift that bit extra special.
Conclusion
There are a number of reasons why collecting photos in photo books is so rewarding. From the creative process, to giving them a physical form, to gifting someone the perfect present, they can be fun and lighthearted or poignant and sentimental. Perhaps the most important reason, is to extricate your favourite photos from the disposability of the digital realm, giving them life and making them something to be treasured and cherished.
