![]() Rather than bemoan the decline in quantity, let’s celebrate the chance to produce higher quality prints that digital tech gives us. From design to photography to paper selection, everything has improved. Circulation of any given publication may be smaller, but each is higher quality and more targeted. Despite what people perceive as a decline in print media, the number of magazines produced has stayed constant since 2008, according to 99U. Take independent publishing, which has increased in recent years largely because of digital tech and the internet, ironically. (Keypoint Intelligence also expects the downward trend is slowing, and will level out at around 36 billion prints by 2021.) While this may be bad news for the drugstore photo lab, it doesn’t spell doom for the art of the print in fact, one could argue it has elevated it. The number of standard 4 x 6-inch photo prints is expected to decline to 39 billion this year, down from 47 billion in 2014, according to information provided to Digital Trends by Keypoint Intelligence. To be sure, digital has indeed changed how we print, and there’s no going back. Polaroid Originals (formerly the Impossible Project) has built an entire brand around it, and Fujifilm Instax cameras and film packs made up six of the top ten best selling photography products on Amazon last holiday season. Even the “low end” of printing is alive and well as instant photography has seen a huge resurgence in recent years. Now that we don’t need prints to do that, it makes sense that people are choosing not to spend money on them, especially when electronically sharing images also happens to be much more convenient.īut people still love prints. What’s more, the point of printing (often the point of taking a photo in the first place) was to share your memory with someone else. ![]() Every print costs money, after all, so of course people aren’t going to print 1.3 trillion photos (maybe they’ll print a minuscule fraction of that, like, oh, 80 billion). With so many photos being taken, it’s no wonder so relatively few are being printed. For the mathematically disinclined, let’s put it another way: Subtracting the total number of photos made in the year 2000 from those made in 2017 would have no effect on the number of shirtless mirror selfies posted by lonely men on Tinder. Sure, that sounds like a lot (it was a new milestone at the time), but for those who think of such large numbers as vague clouds of zeros, consider that 80 billion is still 1.12 trillion shy of 2017’s 1.2 trillion photos. Far fewer, in fact - in 2000, Kodak announced 80 billion pictures had been taken that year. If fewer were forgotten, it was because fewer were made. Most were destined for photo albums or shoeboxes that would sit around and collect dust until moving day. We tend to romanticize the print, but when printing was the norm, many photos were still lost and forgotten (and some were found again). In 2017, billions of humans with smartphones will take some 1.2 trillion pictures. We’d drop our film off at the drugstore and pick it up 24 hours later not because it was a better system, but because it was all we had. Prints used to be the only way we had to view our photos (short of shooting slide film and using a projector). Print is dead, or at least dying, right? In truth, a certain type of print has certainly declined, but this isn’t a tragedy. It’s a common refrain in the digital age, and not just in reference to photography. If you haven’t yet tried your hand at photo printing, you owe it to yourself to do so, even if you’re just a casual photographer. Honestly, there has never been a better time to print than now, thanks to technological advances in both digital cameras and inkjet printers. It is now about quality rather than quantity, and the pictures we choose to print deserve the best treatment. We may no longer print every photo by default, but this can actually be a good thing for printing. The reasons for this are rational, and there’s no point fighting progress, but nor should we ignore the value of a print. But hardly any will make the transition into the physical world, bits becoming blots of ink that coalesce into an image on a piece of paper, canvas, wood, or metal - a print. A few good selfies will flash before your eyes as you swipe left or right on them, late some Friday night. Many of them will be shared on social media, but many more will simply be forgotten. This year, it is estimated that billions of humans armed with smartphones will take some 1.2 trillion pictures. FilippoBacci/Getty ImagesAs a society, we now produce more photographs than ever before, and the total number is becoming difficult to fathom.
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