Why physical photos are important!
We experience a deluge of content every single day. Many of us CREATE some form of content every single day. The resulting oversaturation often leads to a very shallow degree of consumption of said content – can you remember the last reel you watched? What was the last photo you liked on Facebook? What was your favourite TikTok from last week? How many YouTube videos did you watch yesterday?
If you’re a human, the answer to those questions is probably along the lines of “…….?”
On the other hand, can you picture the walls of your residence right now? Of course you can! You’re there every single day, they never move, their contents rarely change, so you can picture them almost perfectly. They are a reliable presence in your life, for better or worse.
On your phone however, how many photos and videos are in your Favourites folder? How often do you actually look at them? How many photos did you take this month? Compared to last month? How many last year?
Data shows we are taking more and more photos and videos each year, raising the demand for higher storage volume on phones, tablets and computers alike. Which is fantastic! You will NEVER regret the photos you DID take, only the photos you didn’t.
… but how often are you looking at those tens of thousands of photos? Personally, my camera roll has 31,681 photos at time of writing, and my Favourites folder has 419. My dogs’ Instagram has almost 2000 posts – most of which are carousels – and my personal account has over 1800, and I’ve barely even posted on it for the last several years!
The idea of using our social media as a photo album is long past, there is simply too much content, too many experiences, too many loved ones, too much life to post! We’re stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
Rock = living in the now, posting our lives or interests in real time so we can look back on what life was like.
Hard place = so much content we can no longer find any of those extra special photos, they’ve been lost to our feeds and photo folders.
Enter: printed photos.
You may lose special photos in the depths of your phone, but you know what you NEVER lose?
Those glorious walls we spoke of earlier.
Those bad boys aren’t going anywhere. They are there despite how many TikTok’s we consume, despite how many holiday photo dumps we post. A beautiful photo on your wall is there for your enjoyment not just for 24hrs before disappearing into the void of Instagram archives – it’s there 24/7.
Content is constantly whizzing by us at lightspeed, and who can possibly remember anything other than the vague dopamine hit we achieved with our incessant scrolling? What you WILL remember, is how a physically printed photo in your hands makes you feel every time you look at it. How can you not? No scrolling, no distractions, just a stunning memory captured forever, reminding you of the love and the joy and the relationship behind it.