I’ve said before (lots of times I imagine) that I have a bit of a photo obsession and that I have thousands upon thousands of photos documenting our family life. They’re all stored safely on an external hard drive and every now and again, I sit and look through them, often with the kids looking over my shoulder ooohing and aaahing as they see their favourite memories pop up on my laptop screen.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to have these photos stored in a safe place but sometimes, I miss the old photo albums that we had when I was little, like the ones my Dad gave me after my Mam died. There’s nothing like turning the page of an old photo album is there?
And it’s not just that, seeing your picture in print just seems so much nicer than seeing it on a screen.
So why not print out more of your photos and spend time with the kids turning special memories into a photo album, or making a photo wall so they’re permanently on display. I’ll be sharing my ideas on how to display your photos in a couple of weeks but first, lets find a way to get them printed without costing you a fortune….
Print off your Instagram photos
There are lots of sites who will print off your instagram photos and post them to you. I’ve used Polargram before and they were brilliant although I’m sure their prices have gone up since I used them last. Still, 48 Instagram photos for £12 is a good price and definitely the easiest option of printing photos as there’s no uploading photos of faffing about – you literally log in to your Instagram account through the Polargram site and click on the photos you want printing.
Take advantage of ‘Free Prints’ offers online
Lots of online photo printing sites offer you incentives to register with them so it’s worth having a look around and seeing who’s offering free printing if you register with them. At the moment Jessops are offering 100 free prints if you register with them, Photobox are offering 40 free prints, Snapfish are offering 20 free prints and PhotoWorld are offering 50 free prints. You still pay for postage with most of these companies so your free prints will probably cost you a couple of pounds. That’s still a great deal, especially with the larger offers.
Print out your photos at home
This is something I haven’t done much of in the past because printer ink just seems to go down so quickly when we print photos. In the past, we’ve used sites like Picmonkey to make collages of our favourite photos and then printed out the collage rather than each picture individually. This saves on paper and printer ink and also means you can personalise the collage a bit if you want to. Our local pound shop do photo paper now as well which makes the photos you print look like even better.
We’ve been printing out more photos at home recently as we’re signed up to the HP Instant Ink service as part of a review we’re doing – more on that very shortly but I wanted to give you a heads up about it as it’s a brilliant service that we’ll be keeping on after the review has ended and makes printing at home a much more affordable option.
In-store photo printing
Printing your photos off on one of those machines in your local supermarket is definitely not the most cost effective way to print your photos but not too bad if you only want a couple printing off or if you want them printing in a hurry and you’re out of ink at home.
However you do it, just get printing because I’ve got lots of ideas on what to do with your photos coming up soon!
