Why I Still Print My Photos in a Digital World

When I decided to re-start this website earlier this year, I began by scanning through some old hard drives — and ended up losing myself for a day or two in the photos I’ve taken over the years.

Photos that, unless I’d gone digging out of necessity, probably would’ve sat there untouched for another decade. Maybe longer. Maybe until the drives finally failed — and with them, thousands of memories quietly disappeared.

I’m sure I’m not the only photographer with hard drives full of moments that never see the light of day.

That’s why I love to print. It’s why I made a promise to myself to start building printed photo albums with my eldest daughter, Sofia — and to print at least one or two images every month to hang on our walls.

But in a digital age where everything lives on screens, why bother printing at all?

Why Printing Matters

I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, and I still remember my dad taking pictures on our childhood holidays — and the wait to get the photos back from the local shop.

We’d head into town, do the shopping, and pick up that little pack of 24 or 36 photos before heading home to scan through them. It was as big a part of photography as pressing the shutter. A quick flip through usually revealed a few out-of-focus shots, a photo of the floor, or something badly exposed — but inside that pack were always one or two gems that made it into the family album.

I might not look through that album again for a year or two, but when I did, having a physical print to remind me of the trip or occasion felt real — tangible — like a fragment of time captured forever.

I can look at a thousand images on a screen and rarely feel the same emotions as I do holding a print in my hands. When I was shooting a project in Devon about the places my late father grew up, it was those old family photo albums that brought the memories back — far more than the thousands of digital images stored on hard drives.

There’s something about holding and studying a physical print that lets you connect with a photo in a deeper way than you ever can staring at a screen.

Now, when I take a photo of my daughters, I print it and put it on the wall. Every day I walk past those images and feel that moment again — a reminder that time is moving, and it’s important (for me at least) to capture it. Not just to remember the places we’ve been, but to remember how this time in our lives felt: the little smiles, gestures, and moments that stir something inside.

I learned to print as a landscape photographer in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. I spent countless hours choosing papers, tweaking settings, calibrating colours, and perfecting museum-grade prints that were sold in galleries and now hang in homes across the world. But none of those landscapes hit me emotionally like the memories I’m printing now.

Family memories. Moments in time, frozen forever and brought to life on paper.

A lot of people get snobbish about printing — especially in the fine art world — and I understand the desire to maintain quality and longevity. But for most of us, the real value in printing is simpler: it’s the act of turning a memory into something you can hold. It’s the final piece of the photographic process — and the one that brings your photos to life the most.

Whether you’re calibrating a 44” printer with beautiful cotton rag papers or printing on a small home printer with standard photo stock, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it means something to you.

When a Photo Finally Feels Complete

For me, a photo isn’t finished until I print it. It’s the final part of the puzzle — the moment that tells me, this work is complete.

Printing feels as essential to the creative process as finding the composition, chasing the light, or editing the image. Not every photo I make is meant to be printed, but for the ones that make me feel something, producing that final print is the culmination of everything I put into it.

When I see the paper rolling off my Canon printer, it reminds me that all the effort was worth it — the physical result of an idea made real, something I can hold, enjoy, and share.

Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe others don’t feel the same.

I’d love to know — do you still print your photos, or do digital albums give you the same satisfaction?