I know the feeling. The excitement of receiving your online gallery from a photo session. You browse through them, save a few favorites to share on social media, and then what? Then you kind of forget about them for too long and feel bad for not printing out your photos. And then you may be thinking where do I print photos from my session anyway?

I’m here to help.

And you don’t have to print your photos from anywhere fancy.

Personally, I like budget, quality, easy places to print my photos from. I’m sharing my favorites with you.

Why Printing Your Photos Is Important

Maybe you’ve invested in a portrait session because you wanted some fresh pictures of your family. Maybe you documented a milestone moment like a newborn session, senior portraits, wedding, or pictures with your extended family.

Pictures stop moments in time. They create memories. Having those pictures in our home and on our walls brings happiness and makes your space so much more personalized.

We like to share our lives through social media. Everything is digital nowadays. And while that is great, it doesn’t replace the specialness of filling your home with photographs.

Where To Print Photos

If you Google “Where To Print Photos” then you’re probably going to be overwhelmed, think “I’ll just do this later,” shut your computer and then months will go by before you think about it again.

Oh, maybe that’s just me…

It doesn’t have to be complicated. If you have recently had a professional photography session done, download ALL the photos from the session and save them to your computer. (And iCloud or a similar backup service.) Then you’ll have all of your images saved and can easily browse though to find your favorites.

Here’s a list of places I trust and have used to print my photos:

That’s it. I’ve been happy with the price, quality, and variety of print sizes and photo products available from all of these places.

I like to order basic prints from either Walgreens or Costco. Most of the time I use Costco for larger prints and Christmas Cards. SmallWoodHome has awesome canvas and framed prints. Shutterfly offers a variety of photo products and albums. f32 is a local print store. Most of the time I can find a sale at any of these retailers to save even more money.

Tips For Printing Your Photos

I’ve made so many mistakes printing off photos. Badly cropped images, colors are all out of whack, and album design is off, just to name a few. For photography classes in college, I had to print off TONS of images. I’ve learned to always check a few things:

Cropping: Usually the websites will tell you if you need to crop your image. You can easily add the crop on their website while ordering photos. ALWAYS do this. Otherwise, you’ll end up with oddly cropped images and will want to reprint them correctly.

Editing: All my images, and most professional photographers, edit the photos before delivery. Editing is not needed when printing your photos. It could throw off the colors of the image. You may want to turn a photo black and white, which would be fine, but don’t add on a bunch of filters to color photographs.

Printing images too large: If you happen to print a photo taken from a phone, the quality usually starts to get worse after 8×10. I have an 11×14 print of an iPhone 8+ photo I took and it’s a little blurry, but not horrible. Most professional quality images can be turned into very large prints without losing too much quality. Similar to the cropping issue, the program you use will likely tell you if the image resolution cannot work with the print size if there’s an issue.

Save the photos you want to print in a separate folder: This will make it easier when you go to upload photos and order prints. It will save you time and you will be sure to print all the photos you wanted.

Figure out the space in your home where you want your photos to go: This will help you determine how many photos to print out and you can pick a few that go together.

Other Ideas For Your Photo Session Images

What else can do you with images from your photo session? Here are a few ideas:

  • Album(s)
  • Scrapbook
  • Calendar
  • Share on Facebook/Instagram
  • Christmas Cards
  • Thank You Cards
  • Lifestyle Images For Your Website/Online Presence

I hope you are inspired to print your pictures now!

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