I was ready to be home.
After three very busy days in New York City, I sat at a crowded airport gate, waiting for my flight to be called, too distracted and tired to focus on any of the books on my Kindle.
To pass the time, and to take a break from the phone that had been glued to my hand during all the social media events, I reached into my bag and sorted through the business cards and other materials I’d collected.
I pulled out a photo strip my friend Julia and I had made in a photo booth at one of the events and smiled, thinking it was a fun memory, even if one of the photos had been snapped at a moment we weren’t expecting.
Photo of my photo strip. Actual photo strip looks clearer. 😉
Before I could slide it back into my bag, the woman beside me grabbed my arm and asked “Where did you get that?”
I told her that it was at an event I’d just been to and she said, “It’s lovely. You’ll want to keep that. I didn’t know they still made those.”
A few more minutes passed and I continued sorting the contents of my bag, which seemed to be the thing to do, as the woman beside me had started doing the same thing.
She touched my arm again, and showed me a photo, asking if I recognized one of the girls in the photo. I smiled and nodded, knowing one of those girls was her.
She explained that she had moved to New York City back when she was 18 and that photo was taken a few months later, when her younger sister came to visit. That there used to be photo booths on the streets of New York where you could have your photo taken and she and her sister had used one to capture their visit of almost sixty years ago.
She started to tear up as she told me that her sister had passed several years ago. Then she patted my arm and said, “Hang on to those pictures.”
This wasn’t intended to be a post about a product, but since the story happened thanks to a photo strip I got at the MyPrintly event, I thought I’d tell you briefly about the really cool things HP is doing so we can actually have printed photos, not just ones that stay on our devices, but ones we can someday pull out of our purses in an airport, sixty years later.
They were just testing out the photo strip printing and I really hope it’s available soon. There’s an app they use to take the three photos and then the paper that it’s printed out on has 2 copies of the photos, with an easy tear apart strip. They asked us questions about if we’d use this technology and if we thought it would be something people would like- YES, 100% YES! I really hope to see this soon.
The app you can get right now to print some of your photos from social is HP Social Media Snapshots, which lets you print photos right from your social media accounts on your phone.
You can see what other great ideas HP has for your photos by visiting MyPrintly.
I attended the MyPrintly event. I was not compensated (other than with a really cool swag bag and the best cupcakes ever). I added the info about HP to the story I planned on sharing anyway, just in case you’re like me and rarely have photos printed but want to change that.Â