Are photo albums back in the frame?

Before phone cameras, Instagram, Facebook, photo apps and the cloud, there was the photo album, packed with prints tucked behind rows of clear plastic sleeves.

A low-tech visual timeline of our lives, the photo album for generations marked our 21st birthday parties, holidays, graduations, weddings, children’s milestones and the inevitable cycle into middle and old age. If you’re in any doubt as to whether the wonders of digital photography have sent the photo album into a death spiral, try buying one at any of the major retail outlets. They’re still around, but usually restricted to a small and sad selection shoved in a corner.

The pre-digital era practice of putting photos in albums was always a sticky affair.Credit: Stocksy

The photo album was the primary storage site of 20th-century photography. In the pre-digital days, we had to curate our prints prudently: photo development wasn’t cheap and we never knew whether a shot would be framing material or a blurry mess until we opened the paper envelope at the chemist. I kept photo albums for more than 20 years, slipping additional memorabilia such as plane, football and film tickets under the plastic sleeves.

Then, 10 years ago, I stopped.

That’s because photo albums seemed unnecessarily fussy when our photographic bounty was spread across online sites, remote storage and various hard drives, when the sheer number of photographs made the task of printing them out forbidding. But this fragmentation is what drove me back to the photo album – or its digital update, the photo book – after I lost hundreds of photographs when my desktop computer fritzed.

Photo books, created through various websites, phone apps and in stores like Officeworks and Kmart, have become brisk sellers, say retailers. “We launched photo books in 2017, and since then the category has tripled in size each year,” notes Taymoor Atighetchi, founder and CEO of stationery company Papier. “Digitally made photo books offer more layout flexibility than a photo album.”

Adds Toby Watson, general manager of merchandise at Officeworks: “You no longer have to transfer photos to a computer or USB to print. You can produce a photo book in minutes straight from your smartphone or tablet and have it delivered to your door in the click of a button.”

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.