Facebook changes photo sharing and printing for ever:
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, you know that digital pictures are quickly replacing printed photos. DSLR’s are still popular—and getting more popular and more sophisticated all the time—but the number of photos printed each year is much smaller than it was ten years ago, and continues to steadily decline.
Social media platforms like (and especially) Facebook have developed a new stage and storage space for candid photos of our friends and family and have all but erased the need for printed photos. We can easily upload photos to our profiles and share them instantly with a huge network of people, and even choose who can see them and who can’t.
With all the free storage online, why pay to have the same photos printed, especially when you can view and comment on friends’ photos without every physically seeing or holding them?
In an effort to stay relevant and competitive, Kodak is partnering with Facebook and offering 20 free prints of your Facebook photos if you Like their page—you’ll get a voucher which you can print and present at any participating photo developing center.
Kodak has made similar efforts over the past few years, and has done a pretty good job of remaining powerful in a market that has nearly forgotten photo prints. You can find Kiosks at various retailers that let you access Facebook and print photos directly from the site, without even carrying a flash drive or SD card to upload photos.
The real news here isn’t so much that Kodak is offering free prints, but that the entire concept of social photography is changing. It is comforting to know, for those of us that grew up with prints, that there is still room for printed photos in today’s world, but the field is quickly…ahem, developing…and it is exciting to see where social media takes other conventional forms of media sharing and distribution as it grows.
Lauren Bailey