Your family’s memories deserve more than a little disk space on a hard drive somewhere - even your cell phone snaps. As parents, we walk around with large camera rolls on our phones of special memories. But when you think about photos from a kids perspective - our phones are not tangible to them, nor are they something that our kids can reach for whenever they want.

Whether you’re a busy parent that means to get those photos printed (believe me, I get it), or you simply don’t know how to begin printing your photos, this blog will outline important reasons to print your memories - and how to get started without overwhelm.

The 5 Reasons to Print Your Family Photos Right Now

Note: The following reasons have all come personal firsthand experiences, or experiences that people (friends, family, and clients) have shared with me.

Reason #1: Tech failures and changing technology.

Tech failures happen frequently. Just look at all of the “uh oh” tech recovery programs available, and you’ll see there’s a huge industry for tech service. Plus as old tech dies off, there’s a constant need to update to new systems. Do you remember what floppy disks were? Exactly. Printing your photos into a book or photo album circumvents the tech headaches.

Reason #2: Tech mishaps.

I'm even guilty of this one! I have a secure system to backup all of the photos I take with my pro digital camera. My everyday phone photos of my family, however, were another story. I thought I had copied years of photos onto a hard drive to back them up and accidentally deleted them instead. (Sadly, a very true story.)

Lucky for us, I’ve been printing our favorite phone photos for years. The most important ones were safely stored in our photo albums and part of my account with Mpix, which is the print lab that I trust with our everyday memories. Because those files had been printed, I was able to download them again to safely back up onto a hard drive.

Reason #3: Your kids want to see their memories.

When my son was two years old, I purchased a simple 4x6 photo album from a craft store that held 200 photos. I started slowly filling it up with some core memories - starting with my big, pregnant belly and an ultrasound pic - and regularly added to it as time passed. My son was thrilled with this gift - and I quickly learned that it is one of his most treasured possessions.

My son is now five years old, and still regularly takes the album out to flip through memories. He especially likes to point out pictures of us together and say, “look mama.” Moments like these are one of the reasons I care so deeply about creating photographs where mothers are present with their children during my motherhood sessions in Bend, Oregon.

Printed family photos become part of your home life.

Printed family photos don’t just preserve memories — they become woven into your everyday life. Kids notice the albums on shelves, framed photographs on walls, and books they can pull out whenever they want. Unlike digital files hidden away on devices, printed photographs become part of your family culture and the visual story of your home.

Pro Tip: This is a great bonding activity for bedtime that can be paired with reading stories.

Reason #4: Access to the photos.

Sadly, I know too many instances where a family member passed away and no one else in the family knew passcodes to get into hard drives or files. Thousands upon thousands of family memories have been lost this way. Don’t just think about printing photos as a task that takes up time today; think about it as an important way to preserve memories for the future.

Reason #5: Don’t let all that paid family photography goodness go to waste.

Whether it’s through a gallery connected to a print lab or assisting you in printed product selection, ideally your photographer will provide some sort of guidance or service to help you print your portrait sessions. If that’s not the case and you only have digital images from a professional gallery, consider this as your starting point to get those photos into print.

If you’re looking for a photographer that helps families turn their memories into tangible keepsakes, I’d love to speak with you about my Bend family photo sessions.

A hardcover album of an in-home lifestyle family session that I photographed a couple years back.

How to Print Family Photos Without Feeling Overwhelmed

If you’ve got a backlog of family memories that are sitting in digital storage, it can feel daunting to think about printing them out. The good news is that printing family photos does not have to feel overwhelming. In fact, you can pick a strategy and chip away at it a little at a time until you’re caught up.

Pro Tip: Instead of scrolling social media, set a timer for 20 minutes while you pick favorite photos from your cell phone camera roll.

Step 1: Select your favorite photos from events - and delete the rest.

If I just shocked you (gasp, a photographer talking about deleting photos?), then perhaps you haven’t yet come across the quality over quantity mentality when it comes to family photography. Not every photo is a winner - especially with digital photography making it so easy to keep snapping away. The act of choosing which photos to keep and which to disregard - called culling in professional photography - is important in finding the best images that represent a season in life.

Pro tip: Follow your gut reaction when you look at an image.

If you smile and think about that moment, it’s a keeper. If it doesn’t pull an emotional reaction, it’s not a keeper.

Step 2: Choose how you would like to display the photos.

The two most common methods for printing family photos are placing them into a designed photo book, or printing individual 4x6 pictures to slot into a scrapbook or album. You can choose whichever method works best for you, or even take a hybrid approach.

These aren’t the only options, though. For some photos, I like printing 5×5 square images on matte paperand standing them up in wood blocks. It’s easy to move them around the house or swap pictures in and out.

Two 5x5" square photo prints displayed in wood holders.

After several years of tinkering around with how to print my own family memories, I’ve landed on the preferred method for us: designed photo albums for our professional family photography shoots or special photo projects I take on in a year (like a p52), and individual 4x6 photos that I add to large albums for everyday memories.

Step 3: Pick a print lab that will allow you to work on this project bit by bit.

I’ll preface this with: please don’t use one hour print labs unless it’s so urgent that you actually need a photo in one hour (hello, forgotten school class projects). One hour print services like Walgreens, Walmart, or CVS (yes, even Costco) have lower quality printers that oversaturate photographs compared to dedicated photo printing labs. This is not the quality you want for your family’s memories that you hand down to your kids - it’s cheap for a reason.

This is especially true for fleeting seasons like newborn days, when tiny details change so quickly and deserve to exist somewhere beyond a screen.

Choose an online lab that allows you to save a project and come back to it. Bonus if it allows you to easily upload photos from a mobile device. Shutterfly, Chatbooks, and Snapfish are brand names commonly passed out in Facebook groups, but I personally don’t recommend using them for photo printing.

I personally love printing 4x6 pictures through Mpix because of 3 reasons: 1) they are the client-facing side of a well-respected and well-established printing company in the United States, 2) any photo uploaded to their system stays with your account (remember how I said I was able to recover cherished photos earlier?), and 3) it is possible to upload photos from your mobile device fairly easily.

I have used MPix, Chatbooks, Parabo Press, and Shutterfly to make photobooks also. Of these services, I would recommend MPix the most because of the photo printing quality.

Second to that, I liked the Chatbooks mobile app - but they are expensive little books for the quality you get. However, I plan on shopping around and trying different photobooks services to see which is my absolute favorite.

Hardcover Chatbook photo book (left) vs. hardcover Parabo Press photobook (right).

Step 4: Start Printing Your Family Photos One Piece at a Time

Don’t try to print every photo all at once. If you’re sitting on years worth of photos, then do yourself a huge favor and give yourself grace. It took time to create those memories, so it’s also going to take time to print them out. Decide on a period of time to focus on, and that’s your starting point. For example, you could start with the current year and work your way backwards. Or, if you prefer chronological order - pick a starting point in the past that’s important, and work your way up to the present.

Remember when I said I started my son’s photo album when he was two years old? There were two years worth of photos to sort through and decide what to put into the album. It took a bit of time, and then after that I just kept up with it about every six months. It’s okay to chip away at the task a bit at a time - preferably when the rest of life doesn’t feel as busy.

Pro Tip: Slow winter months (like January and February) are an excellent time to start a project like this.

At the end of the day, your family photos are meant to be lived with — not forgotten in digital storage somewhere. The blurry phone snapshots, the professional family portraits, the tiny everyday moments that didn’t seem important at the time… these are the pieces of your family’s story.

You don’t need a perfect system or a weekend of uninterrupted free time to get started. Pick a handful of favorite images, print them, and let that be enough for now. Years from now, your children won’t care whether your photo albums were perfectly curated. They’ll just be grateful that the memories exist at all.