Poll: your photo printing habits

[Bean Counter]

Curious what the trend is with hunters and their photographs.

[runamuk]

I will print for a show, or as the last time I printed was for a class and for gifts they were printed by me and matted and such but these werent just snapshots.  My random stuff lives in my computer and sometimes on those little usb doodads.

Now if I had darkroom access I would print a whole lot more and shoot more.

[Bean Counter]

I fall into the 4th category: I print all the keepers, and I make an album every year for my wife and I, and one for each kid for their homes when they leave the nest. I'm also looking into printing a separate loose set of archival quality prints in addition to the loose keepers I have. While the bulk of the loose prints I have are made at Costco, who uses Fuji Crystal Archive paper, IDK whether or not the ink and dye process they use is archival quality. Besides, I like the lustre for fingering through (its more fingerprint resistant), but would prefer glossy for the archive given its better saturation and contrast rendition.

I don't Polaroid but wouldn't mind if the film prices were cheaper. Right now its about $4 per print. The Impossible Project is a story of resurrection from the grave of almost Biblical proportions. Check out the Netflix video for an even more in depth story covering the Impossible Project.

The Impossible Project Story

[Don Fischer]

The nearest Walmart to get them done at is about 50 mi from here. Cost me more in gas to get there and back than I could save. I have two printer's, a 13" Canon and a Canon Ip100. Lp100 is really smatt and prints up to 81/2x11. I can run it anywhere I want off of a 400 watt inverter in the car. Cost's about $.30 for a 4x6. My 13" printer primt's about anything you want up to 13x19. With mine beside that I've made 13x16, 9x18, 8x16, 4x8, 11x17,11x14 8sx10 and came select to print anything else I might want up to 13x19. !3x19 and 13x16 make really stunning photo's.

[quadrafire]

Don
I see you are from Antelope. Any of the rajneeshee still around there?

As to the OP. I take alot of kid photos, unfortunately rarely print anymore. When i do it is usually on line to Costco.
Picked up a canon selphie printer for my daughter for Christmas so she can print from her little camera. It is a pretty slick little printer, and portable.

[Bean Counter]

Google boss warns of 'forgotten century' with email and photos at risk
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/google-boss-warns-forgotten-century-email-photos-vint-cerf

PRINT. YOUR. PHOTOS.

"..The warning highlights an irony at the heart of modern technology, where music, photos, letters and other documents are digitised in the hope of ensuring their long-term survival. But while researchers are making progress in storing digital files for centuries, the programs and hardware needed to make sense of the files are continually falling out of use.

“We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it. We digitise things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artefacts that we digitised,” Cerf told the Guardian. “If there are photos you really care about, print them out.”

Edit: hyperlink added 

[Bean Counter]

The Motion Picture industry continues to archive on film given digital medias inherent instability. Good read for keeping important documents and media in as tangible of form possible.

 http://leicaphilia.com/the-elephant-in-the-digital-darkroom/

In addition to digital’s lack of tangibility, digital hardware and storage media are much less stable than 35mm film. Hard drives fail in as little as two years when not regularly used, and even the most archival grade DVDs degrade and become unreadable within 2 decades. According to the report, only half of “archival quality disks” can be expected to last for 15 years. Digital audiotape tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades and becomes unreadable. Constant changes in technology only add to the digital confusion: as one generation of digital storage replaces the previous, archived materials must be transferred to the new format, or they eventually become unreadable. My graduate thesis, written on an 80’s era IBM and saved to one of those giant floppies, is unrecoverable 30 years later. There’s no equipment to read it. Meanwhile, every negative I’ve ever sleeved from 1971 onward is perfectly preserved in binders, ready to be wet-printed or scanned. Before your faith in technology causes you to dismiss this as anecdotal hysteria, consider this:  recently NASA discovered that they were unable to read digital data saved from a Viking space probe in 1975 because the format was now obsolete. Think about that.

[fishnfur]

Snapfish.com has periodic specials for penny/print.  300 prints for 3 bucks, etc.  I just pick random kid shots and print them out so that when/if they ever want to, they can dig through and pick out the ones they want.

I have about 10ish albums from my youth that I never look at.  Once a decade is enough.  Photos are great reminders of what we were and proof that we had a enough fun to stop and record the moment.  The way that society has turned photos from that rare opportunity to record a special moment or occasion into something that is done many times per day makes me wonder if the next generation will ever look back to remember the past the way my generation did.  Way too hard to go through all that dribble and selfies.....

[Firedogg]

 For my wildlife and scenic photos I will usually print out ones I can sell or that someone requests. I've printed from small 2"x2" photos all the way up to 60" on the long side. For my personal wallhangers I like to do stretched canvas prints because I don't need a frame for those and they are pretty cool looking. So I am not printing huge numbers of prints, just looking for the quality ones.
 
  For my smaller, up to 24x18 I print at Costco. I've been working with the techs at the one in Puyallup since they first started doing digital prints. At first I was telling them how to do things, now they tell me how. (Same 3 main techs working there since 2000). Costco uses the same printer and papers as any of the so called pro labs and maintains their equipment well. The results of prints I've had done at both to compare are the same and sometimes better from Costco.

  Now here's the important stuff.  Every picture thar has a family member or event gets printed at least as a 4x6. It is so nice to sit around with family to looks a pictures, pass them around, and have something physical in your hands. This has proved to be so valuable in our family this last week since we lost dad and are preparing for his memorial. It's been therapy for us all. The ones on the computer just don't have that same value for us.

Don, it's still less expensive to send your image files out for printing than to do it yourself. That stinking ink costs more than gas at it's high point. Costco, Walmart and the other chain places all ship pretty reasonably, especially for 4x6 and 5x7 prints.