by Clare Porter

Inspired by the buzz around our clients’ recent photokina 2016 PR and marketing campaigns, I went searching for my digital camera… and I did have to do some real searching for both camera and charger.

Like most of us, I don’t often feel I need it. With a perfectly good camera built into my Smartphone and therefore, on me at all times, I take pictures almost every day. They accumulate quickly in a digital library and I share the best with friends and family on social media. But what then? Well, if I’m feeling super organised, I’ll download them all onto a hard drive that lives at the back of a drawer where my long forgotten camera also spends most of its life.

It’s during the search for the camera that I stumble upon some printed photographs tucked away in the wallet they came in, when I picked them up from some chemist years ago. They’re of a family holiday way back when and it gets me thinking, when is the last time I printed out my holiday pictures? The answer is five years ago. Five years ago! It’s not as if I haven’t been on a holiday since then, I just haven’t felt the need to print out any photos from those subsequent holidays. Shameful for someone who works in the printing industry, but also a sad reflection on the way we, photo consumers, are sharing and saving our most treasured memories. In this day and age where cameras are a part of our everyday lives, surely we should be printing more photos, not less?

I suspect it’s because photos today are a more immediate and disposable commodity – taken and shared socially in an instant – and superseded sometimes minutes later. Unlike photography of 20 years ago, photos today cost nothing to take and view, so the perceived value has reduced.

So printing our photos is just not in the culture of consumers today, and obviously, I am as guilty of this as anyone else. However, it did hit home that this presents a huge opportunity for photo printers and it’s an opportunity that many are taking advantage of already by offering quick and easy ways to compile and print photobooks, cards and other photo gifts.

According to Future Market Insights (FMI), the shift towards online photo sharing has actually helped strengthen online photo printers’ opportunities for growth. These printers often link their printing services to social media channels or photo sharing platforms to make it even more convenient for a consumer to simply click through and print their pictures.

In a recent report, Futuresource Consulting noted that the merchandise and photobooks market saw 12.5% growth last year, as photo businesses add new app building departments to their services. This is driven by consumer demand and favourable market conditions as a result of “increased portable device adoption, photo sharing, social media and the consumers’ desire to create more from their digital memories.” Futuresource predicts that “the number of images captured daily in Western Europe is set to be 55 million for digital cameras and 638 million for Smartphones by the end of 2016.” With photo quality and resolution on Smartphone cameras and cameras integrated into other mobile devices increasing, it seems the desire to print images captured with these devices has increased significantly too. Polina Vorms, Research Analyst at Futuresource Consulting, explains that consumers are “finding physical prints unexplored fun,” and states, “If only 1% of these unprinted digital memories were converted into a physical print, then the photo prints market could double in size in one year.”

These findings, and our own experiences of taking an ever-increasing number of photos, tell us that the photo printing market looks set to have a strong and profitable future. The main challenge that printers need to overcome is the consumer mindset as to how photos are shared and stored. Personally, I can’t see my future grandchildren hunting through hundreds of digital files, that may not even open on their futuristic systems, for pictures of their ancestors. I think I owe it to them to take the time to print my photos and keep them safe for generations to come in one of the many beautifully presented, high-quality photobooks available on the market today, or in photo prints framed and placed on the walls of our house.