As you know, I love taking photos when I'm on vacation and sharing them via Instagram (@angloyankophile, btw). When I'm feeling down or bored, I'll flip through the photos on my phone and look at pictures from trips we've taken because the memories make me smile: John poised to sip from a fresh coconut in Ho Chi Minh City, New York's Times Square on a buzzing Friday night, sipping wine on a terrace in the Sicilian countryside ...
I was doing some spring cleaning over the weekend and found dozens of old photos from college that had been tucked away in a "memory" box. Which made me think: what do you do with all your photographs? Do you keep them online and look at them once in a while? Do you make photobooks using services like Snapfish or (my personal favorite) Artifact Uprising? Or do you frame them and put them around your house (sidenote: I love buying picture frames. Love.)?
I do a combination of all three, but I'd like to print more. While a flat is too small to display many photos, I'm hoping to be a London homeowner some day and it's my dream to have walls filled with visual memories - photo collections that tell a story.
Photobooks are great (especially when they're beautifully done, like the ones from Artifact Uprising or Social Print Studio) - sorry I keep mentioning these - I don't work with them, but I just love their products), but I don't look at them often enough. And I don't know about you, but the UK always seems to be a little behind on stuff like this - I find printing services here amateur and poorly designed (if you have a favorite printing studio here, by all means, please let me know).
I tried Inkifi once, for a framed collage print, but was so appalled by their shoddy work (framed photo arrived completely crooked) and could-care-less attitude (their response was that I could easily fix it myself or re-ship it back up to them in Manchester, after it had taken days to arrive in the first place) that I never ordered from them again.
Recently, I tried Pwinty (because I get frustrated with the high shipping cost from the US and I hate having to wait for them until my next trip back to the States) which is a no-frills app that lets you select your photos from Instagram and print them. No borders, no size variations - nothing fancy, but I ordered them while I was still in bed on Saturday morning, the whole process took about 5 minutes, the prints arrived today, and I'm pretty impressed.
The finish is slightly glossy, rather than pure matte, which is usually the more popular choice of finish, but I like them. A lot.
So, tell me: what do you do with your travel pics? And do you have a favorite shop you print with here in the UK or US?