I’m often asked where I recommend printing images or what I use to back up my digital photos on my phone. To better serve my you, I’m spilling my guts and sharing how I store and preserve my family’s photo memories. This is 100% not a paid post of any sort – these are my unsolicited feelings on the products and what I use and recommend in an attempt to provide you with some solutions that may work for you as well. 

PRINT YOUR PHOTOS

Because NOTHING is like having a physical photo in your hand, it’s so important to print your photos. While on vacation last year, my husband thought our two year old in the pool was in trouble. Thankfully he wasn’t, unfortunately though, his phone that was in his pocket was not. We can’t trust our precious family memories to our phones and fate, so getting printing them should be the #1 priority, #2 is getting them off your phone to a digital backup. What I use:

Grovebook

I discovered Groovebook (on Sharktank!) right before my son was born and have a book for every month since he arrived. You can’t go wrong for the price: 100 prints shipped for $3.95/month. However, the quality of the image printing isn’t the same you would get if printing 4x6s from a lab. But I like having these as an archive of my snapshots from my phone and still print additional images elsewhere when they are frame or scrapbook (someday!) worthy. And it’s pretty mindless – it takes 5 minutes to select the images you want to add to the book. I have a calendar reminder set so I don’t forget before my monthly cutoff date (if you don’t upload, you’re still charged – I may have just forgotten for the first time in three years upload images this past month – but you don’t get a book). 

Mpix

I’ve tried countless online consumer photo labs to find the best option to recommend clients use. My favorite has changed over the years but Mpix has been my go to for a many years now. I’m picky about color – you can print the same image at 3+ labs and have them all look different than what they looked like with my edits on screen- so finding a lab with the best color match is important.

Albums/books: 

Nowvel

I’ve used Nowvel a few times to make quick post-vacation books with my phone images and they are my favorite for phone images. I enjoy looking at pages that lay flat, so these meet that requirement and are quick and easy. They are press printed on a nice weight paper (that even withstands toddler page bending). I actually need to get on making one from our recent trip!  And I LOVE that they print on the binding. 

Zno

The flush mount albums from Zno are gorgeous! The difference here is the photo paper. I made a 6×6 mini album with the “real camera” photos from a vacation and they printed beautifully. The app wasn’t the most user/design friendly when I did it, but it may have improved. 

Chatbooks

Hmm… I wanted to love them. I’d heard people talking about them, but they just aren’t for me. They’re a book and not an album. I didn’t realize how much I enjoy looking through albums versus books. I will say, these are fine and better than not having the images printed at all — the quality is fine though the pages are paper so they bend easily — they just aren’t for me. 

DIGITAL STORAGE

Dropbox

What I like about Dropbox is the auto-upload for your phone images AND videos. I’m actually uploading right now! You do have to keep the app open while they upload, but that’s easy enough. I use Dropbox for a variety of cloud storage and think it’s pretty easy to use.

Zenfolio

I’ve been using Zenfolio as my digital photo archive since starting my business in 2007. It was my first website actually! Now I use it as my online storage. It makes me feel so much more comfortable about having this backup God forbid something happen to any printed or digital images. At one point I copied all my images to DVDs (that feels so archaic now!) and hard drives (which I do actually still do as part of my editing workflow), but having this online backup beats all methods if somehow the DVDs/hard drives met a physical demise. 

You can also set up an auto upload from your phone to save photos and then order prints directly through Mpix so I don’t have to upload separately to order prints. I did the auto back up for a while before moving to Dropbox because videos uploaded better. But if I want nice prints of phone photos, I still use Zenfolio and Mpix.

A critical thing to look for when deciding on an online photo storage is that you can download the original file. I have years of photos from the early 2000s on Shutterfly, but at the time they didn’t allow you to download a full resolution file; I could only print the image or get a small file. And that wasn’t okay for me. 

So there you have it… how I store and preserve our family memories.