USB Wedding Albums – Will They Catch On
Now that more and more professional wedding photographers are supplying their clients with their wedding photos on branded USB memory sticks are we ever likely to see traditional wedding albums abandoned in favour of USB sticks entirely.
The short answer is undoubtedly “no”. USB sticks, particularly those where the photographer has put some thought into the design, style and customisation look fantastic and they are a great (and cost effective) way of delivering digital copies of a complete wedding portfolio to the bride and groom. But, even the most tactile, gorgeous, and beautifully presented USB stick is never going to replace a classic wedding album.
Without being ageist and certainly without wanting to stereotype the vast majority of grandparents and great aunts and uncles they are of a generation that wants to leaf through the pages of a well presented album containing actual prints. It’d be no good sending them a USB stick in the post or even sending them a link to the photos on Facebook or Flickr – they will almost all prefer actual photographs.
Bearing in mind that most of the tablet PC’s that are in the market or are being launch have no USB connector so you can’t even plug in the USB stick and view the images on anything like a Google Nexus or iPad – instead they have to be put onto a PC or Mac and then uploaded into “the cloud” and then downloaded onto the tablet. Easy if you’re a savvy tech user or teenager but beyond many millions of people of a certain age or disposition.
USB’s flash drive or memory sticks (they’re called both amongst other things) have been with us for 10 years now and whilst they have all but replaced CD’s and DVD’s they are unlikely to completely replace Wedding Albums in the near future.
There is an inexorable drive towards the digitisation of everything in our lives (music, film, movies, photographs etc.) and we’ve seen huge changes in the way photos are taken (who uses a traditional film camera anymore) but USB sticks are always only going to be a “storage and transport medium” – without a screen they can be little more!
Who knows what the next 10 -20 years will bring – maybe the paper in albums will become a digital membrane that feels like paper, can be turned like paper and can be used to “receive” wedding photos directly from the wedding photographers 4G connected digital camera! – The mind boggles.
