All Of My Photos Are Gone! - Family Photographer Brisbane

Ok, that was maybe an overly dramatic headline. It could have read "Half of My Photos Are Possibly Gone" which is more realistic, but doesnt sound anywhere near as horrifying to read about. And I promise you, right now I am in the horrors so stick with me a minute while I explain.

As a professional family photographer, I am a huge advocate of printing your photos. Digital files are too fickle for me, they're here for a good time, not a long time. Look at them, share them on socials, move on.

Printed photos are like heroes. Proud and real and and part of your family in every day, like here in our kitchen.

I have felt this way for a long time, in fact one of my biggest ever blog posts is specifically about how important printed photos are. But right now I feel even more strongly about printing photos, as I am currently going through the awful horror of a dead hard drive.

5 years of my family memories are trapped inside this block of metal.

My wedding photos.

My first pregnancy photos.

My first baby photos.

My second baby photos.

First Christmases.

Family holidays with my parents who I haven't seen now for more than two years.

Tiny moments of my life that are so precious to me that I cry when I look at them.

Locked somewhere inside this clunky, heavy brick of no value. Kinda looking like this:

Which means nothing to me.

I am screaming in my head "WHYYYY DID I IGNORE THE DRIIIIIVE WEHN IT WAS CRYYYYYING???? WHY WAS IT NOT BACKED UP ANYWHERE ELSE???" I mean, it's a reputable brand, and it's been reliable all these years until suddenly, it wasn't. It was whirring and squealing for around a month before dying, I really should have done something when it started, in hindsight, I was an idiot to ignore it.

Side note: While my personal drive is an old dinosaur, my client drives are RAID drives and backed up in 3 places including cloud storage, but I do know that any digital thing can fail so I truly believe that printing is best.

I had a lot of photos in that drive. Have. I have a lot of photos. Think positive Tarsh!

The fact is, I think we are all secret hoarders of photos. We want all the digital memories of our life, even if we don't know what we are going to do with them. We just .... want them.

Then we disrespect them, like hoarders with so much stuff we cant appreciate it anymore.

You remember a favourite image but cant find it.

You want to revisit the kids first Christmas. Cant find it. "It must be here somewhere!"

If only there were some other way to document our photos....

Well, luckily for me, all is not entirely lost, yet. Firstly, we can pay a data retrieval company somewhere around $1000 - $2500 to attempt to recover our files. It's painful but its something that we will have to try at least.

Secondly, I did happen to print annual albums of some of the years that are locked on this drive. Our annual family albums are looked over much more than the digitals. They are easy to pick up and flip through. The kids can do it anytime they want to, without passwords, without accessing our "adults" computers. Plus the albums have the best photos without all the "other" takes and junk photos around them that we cant delete but don't care as much for (AKA the hoarded photos).

I printed these albums through www.photobookaustralia.com.au in case you were wondering, and I wish I had the time to do this more regularly.

There are places that actually automate your album printing by the way, like https://chatbooks.com who have an automated service that prints a 30 page mini album from photos you have taken the past 30 days.

So I guess my point is this. Printing photos makes them more valuable. It makes them real. It makes them important. My family memories are important to me, and I need to print these annual albums more regularly.

When we get our family photos captured by a professional photographer, we absolutely print them in fine art albums and canvases. Thats the point. I have looked at the digital files of our wedding day or my family photoshoot maybe once or twice ever, but our albums and wall prints are 100% part of our everyday family life.

So liberate your digital files, free them from the jail of the digital hard drive and bring them into the real world, because one day, those prints might be all thats left.