Best Practices for Printing and Sharing Photos

SAVING ~ CROPPING ~ POSTING ~ PRINTING

These are our top recommendations for printing photos sharing your content on social media. There are certain steps to take to ensure your prints or posts looks their best. Certain steps, if not done correctly can leave your photos looking off, including: colors looking strange, grainy or pixelated appearance, or incorrect exposure (too bright or too dark). It breaks our hearts when we arrive to a wedding and see engagement photos printed and not looking their best, or images shared on social media that have lost the high quality we pride ourselves in delivering. If you have any questions at all or would like some help with any of this, please don’t hesitate to reach out! We’re more than happy to help!

1. Saving photos

When you receive your image delivery from us, you’ll get a gallery link and a download button. The gallery link will allow you to view all of your photos on a webpage. This should be used only for viewing. We strongly discourage you from taking screenshots of these images to save them to your phone or computer. A screenshot will result in a greatly degraded image quality. We highly recommend using the download button to save your images to a computer before doing anything with these photos. If your gallery is enabled for individual image downloading, you’ll see an icon to download individual images:

After tapping that icon, you’ll be able to press and hold on the image to bring up an option to save the image to your phone. This saves a full resolution photo into your photo gallery.

2. Cropping

For Prints:

This is the second biggest thing we see which results in low quality images being shared. In general, we shoot, crop, and deliver images which have some extra spacing around the edges to allow for a variety of cropping options. Our cameras shoot in a 2:3 ratio, this means that by default our photos print without any cropping in the following print sizes: 4x6, 8x12, 16x24, etc. If you decide to print an image in a 5x7 or 8x10 ratio, you absolutely can, you’ll just need to choose part of the image to crop out. This often works very well since we shoot with that extra space in mind, however, one example of where this will not work well is a large family portrait with people all the way to the edges. Our best recommendation is to simply choose a print size and subsequent frame in our native ratio (eg print an 8x12 versus an 8x10). You can choose your cropping directly in our web gallery during the print ordering process:

For Posting on Instagram (or other social sites):

We HIGHLY recommend that you do any cropping on your image directly within your phone’s native Photo App (eg “Photos” on iPhones). This is the only way to properly set your cropping without degrading the image quality. Apps like Instagram are technically zooming in on your photo when you crop in their apps. This in turn stretches the pixels causing a fuzzy appearance. If you crop first on your phone, no stretching is required. Some helpful info on ratios: Stories display a 9x16 ratio, Image posts are 4x5. You’ll find the cropping options under the “Edit” button at the top of your screen:

3. PRinting

While you have the photo rights to download and print your images anywhere you please, not all printers are created equal, and not all are properly calibrated. We cannot guarantee the proper look of final printed photos if you use another photo lab besides the one your gallery is integrated with. We know and trust the work they put out, and they are the only lab we recommend for printing. We take special care to color and brightness calibrate our screens to their printers, so we know when we finalize our edits, that is exactly how the photos will look when printed. The same goes for album printing, we use a company called Kiss Albums for all of our albums because we know and trust their quality. They are a direct to professional production company and offer heirloom quality products.