WHY YOU STILL NEED A PRINTER:

There’s one in almost every American household: a shoebox stuffed with faded snapshots of days gone by, the kids’ baby pictures, the ugly dress you wore to the prom, innumerable views of the Grand Canyon, the college roommate passed out drunk. Americans have been filling such shoeboxes for generations, and now, thanks to the delete button on digital cameras, this widespread custom is coming to an end.

I think that this story makes too much of the loss of bad photos, but the loss of hardcopy is a big deal. As Neal Stephenson said a while back:

Paper’s a really advanced technology. That was brought home to me by working on this, when I read a lot of documents from that era, which were put down on really good, acid-free paper. They’re all pretty much as good as they were the day they were made 300 or 350 years ago. This is not going to be true of today’s electronic media in 300 years. There’s a lesson there.

Yes, there is. Home prints are potentially longer-lived than commercial prints, actually (there’s a lengthy discussion from a knowledgeable reader at the end of this post on what technologies are better) but you have to make them. Digital images are potentially immortal, so long as they get recopied from time to time onto fresh media, but reality being what it is, hardcopy in a shoebox is probably likely to outlast things that require actual human effort.

And this point, of course, goes way beyond family photos.