Four Reasons Printed Photo Books Should Never Be a Thing of the Past

Digital life makes many things much easier! It’s made my scrapbooking life easier, for sure, because instead of cropping a photo, I can just resize it. Instead of searching alphabet stickers to discover that I don’t have enough of one letter to make the title I wanted, my digital alphabet supplies are endless.

But none of this takes away from the value of a printed photo book. Here are four reasons printing photo albums should never go out of style, no matter how they are created.

#1 A Place for the Story

Photos are only worth a thousand words if you remember or know why the photo was taken.

And, truthfully, it goes even further. Studies show that writing things down improves your memory. So, when you make a note of the story behind the photo (your own memories), you are actually improving your memory!

Taking a photo and leaving it at that doesn’t provide us the whole experience. Leaving photos on our phones or printing them without their story leaves them meaningless, especially with the overabundance of photos that we have in the 21st century. Putting photos in a book gives us a place to tell their stories. And story, sometimes called journaling, is what gives a photo value.

Note: If you like putting your story to your photos digitally before putting them in a book or scrapbook like I do, this is my recommendation because it’s not only private and triple-backed up but also keeps the metadata (the story you’re adding) with the photo even if it leaves the platform (i.e. you email it to your sister or download it to your computer).

#2 Mental Health Benefits

This might be something we don’t really consider, but spending time putting words to photos and memories has powerful mental health benefits. I’ve mentioned them here at Between the Bookends before (and I have an extensive list of them here at Life Tales Books) but the making of photo books or scrapbooks increases gratitude, happiness, self-esteem, relaxation, and perspective. It’s a guaranteed stress-reliever.

In other words, we need our photo albums more than we may realize!

Don’t limit yourself to a narrow definition of “creative.” Creating just means making something that didn’t exist in the same way before. When you organize photos, you are creating. When you make a meal, you are creating.

And by the way, creating with photos and memories to make a book doesn’t have to be hard or time-consuming. Here are my tips for making it doable!

#3 Accessibility

Digital versions of photos are SO GREAT! Digital photos are easy to take and easy to share.

But only with an expensive device, power, battery, and/or the internet.

Digital photos are dependent. Books are independent. The tangible, visible nature of books make them more widely accessible.

This is particularly important to, say, a 4-year-old who doesn’t own an expensive gadget.

And, let’s be honest. There’s just something about the feel of a book in your hands and the ability to turn its pages that an iPad just doesn’t have.

And this brings us to my last reason that printing photos should never become a thing of the past.

#4 Shareability

Shareability is not only the ability to share but the likelihood of it.

Once you’ve added your stories to your photos in a widely-accessible book, they become both shareable and giftable. There’s something about gifting a photo book that is really not the same as emailing some pictures.

Yes, having a digital backup of photos and photo books is smart (and recommended by photo experts), but they also recommend preserving photos in print!

I was just talking to my chiropractor today, and she had a lot of old family pictures digitized through FOREVER, then she created a simple book from a Create & Print template. She gave the book to her elderly mom, and she told me that her mom takes the book with her everywhere! She loves seeing old pictures, including photos of her parents and husband who have passed on.

And that’s IT. THAT is the power of print.