Living in a digital world has its pluses and minuses, photographically speaking.
It’s easier to find good cameras, get good shots and capture our important moments all day, every day. But, oddly enough, it feels harder and harder to find quality, affordable printing, if you decide you want to bring your snapshots out of the hard drive, and onto a page.
We like turning our digital photos into something tactile, whether it’s to add a little bit of original art to home decor, or to frame up favorite family photos. So between everyone on our team, we’ve tried a lot of printing options — well-known digital players, smaller photo-focused chains, big boxes and corner pharmacy locations.
More often than not, we’ve been disappointed — iffy colors, grainy quality, images that faded in what seemed like no time. Our stacks of misfit photos, over the past few years, have become significant.
Since we’re tumbling into the 2017 holiday season this week, and we’re all bound to snap some family photos — some that we’ll love enough to want to hang on a wall — we thought it was a worthwhile time to help our Nashville friends benefit from both our bad and good choices.
Our photo printing pick:
The ACRE pick for printing your digital photos: Social Print Studio, based in San Francisco.
Between our team, we’ve now printed dozens of images through SPS, from wallet shots for Dads back home to poster-sized prints of the best snapshots from a European vacation. We’ve been happy every time, with the colors, the paper quality, the durability and the clarity.
It makes sense that the small start-up would be good at bringing digital photography to life — they started out helping folks print their social media snaps, and grew from there, keeping a focus on making art printing easy for digital denizens. (Both their website and app are super user-friendly.)
Something we like in particular about Social Print Studio, since we think about home decor and home design pretty frequently: They have a lot of really cool wall-decor options, all of which are impressively affordable.
A few favorites:
— wood panoramic prints that’ll let a little bit of grain show through your landscape photos ($80 for 12” x 36”) https://www.socialprintstudio.com/wood-panoramic/
— metal panoramic prints that give your photos a glossy modern edge ($85 for 12” x 36”)
— the “Wall Filler,” which lets you create a massive 30” x 45” print on thick, high-quality photo paper for only $40
— museum-quality canvas prints, ready to hang, starting at $30
The company handles all sorts of other options too, from packs of little square prints to photo books, photostrips and photo magnets. But their ability to knock out large, over-the-fireplace prints beautifully and affordably really has us sold.
Can we see?
If you grab a few captures over Thanksgiving and Christmas that you’re determined to add to your Nashville walls, or you happen to take some holiday-break off hours to dig through your archives for artful captures, these folks would be our first recommendation for putting those pictures to paper.
Learn more/shop at socialprintstudio.com — and if you end up creating some wall art for your Middle Tennessee home, we’d love to see how it turned out. (Please tag us on Instagram or Facebook with any digital-to-physical-to-digital-again posts you do!)
Need to find the right Nashville walls before you start worrying about Nashville wall art? We’d love to help you track down the perfect place. Reach ACRE here, or for an easy way to get your Nashville househunting process started, fill out this quick form.