Why you should print your photos:

 Even if you’re running low on wall space, printing can still play an important role in archiving your images. The physics of how light bounces off a piece of paper and into your eyes is not going to change, but the way a computer reads an image file does change. JPEG, long the standard of compressed images, is beginning to give way to the new HEIF format. Optical disks like DVDs used to be the gold standard of photo backup, but now they’ve all but vanished. External hard drives have gone through several types of physical connection, from USB to FireWire to Thunderbolt — and several generations of each.

In short, there is no guarantee that the computer of tomorrow will be able to read the photos you take today, unless you consistently modernize your digital archives. Cloud services can certainly help with this, but the companies that run them aren’t guaranteed to be around forever, either.

An archival inkjet print can last for over 100 years when stored properly. It’s not a replacement for digital backups, but for your most important photos, a print offers a very good form of redundancy, at the very least.