Dave Taylor: Lots of options to get those photos from phone to print - Boulder Daily Camera

Question: I take lots of photos with my smartphone, but am in the dark about how to actually get prints if I want to have one forever. Can you help?

Answer: The evolution of photography is rather fascinating. We’ve gone from glass plates and alchemist-level chemical printmaking to instant cameras that could only produce one print per picture to film rolls to digital, where everything’s just a file of pixels. Viewing photos has changed commensurately, too, and now our TVs and “digital” picture frames can show hundreds of images.

But there’s something about the crisp, beautiful permanence of a printed photograph that makes it a valuable keepsake. Your question is spot on, though: How do you take photos with your phone and get prints from them?

One way is to have a photo printer. There are dozens of options from companies like Epson, Canon and HP, but it’s a fair bit of fiddling to get them to deliver great results. Oh, and the cost of all those inks.

Fortunately, photography stores and services have taken up the challenge and you can grab apps for your phone from a wide range of companies, upload and order prints. If you have a cloud backup system for your photos (iCloud on Mac and Google Photos on Android are the most common) you also can print directly from those collections, too.

Boulder-based Mike’s Camera, for example, has a very convenient online photo ordering system that lets you tap directly into your online photo archive. Don’t use the cloud? You can upload them and, as a bonus, if your digital photos make it to your computer, the Web interface is much easier to use than the mobile one.

This still leaves you doing all the work, of course, which is where a new photo print subscription service Google is testing with some Google Photos users is pretty fantastic. It will use AI to go through all the photos you’ve taken in a given month and choose the 10 best to print and send to you — automatically —as 4-by-6 prints.

Better yet, you can choose what kind of photos you’d prefer from three categories: Mostly people and pets, mostly landscapes or alittle bit of everything.

The test program will mail you the 10 4-by-6 matte prints, each with a traditional eighth of an inch white border every 30 days for $7.99 a month. That’s a respectable $0.79 per print, which is a bit high for a 4-by-6, but the convenience is fantastic.

Lots of interesting options. Now give a few of them a try and see which works best for you.

Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since before the launch of the Internet and runs the popular AskDaveTaylor.com tech help site. You can also find AskDaveTaylor on Facebook and check out the AskDaveTaylor YouTube channel , too.

2020-02-09 14:08:08Z
https://www.dailycamera.com/dave-taylor-lots-of-options-to-get-those-photos-from-phone-to-print