JPEG or a print?

TL:DR x1 print gives you x1 copy of that photo whereas you can get infinity copies created from x1 JPEG

Why don't I sell printed products any longer:

The main reason is to keep costs down for my customers: There are so many printing shops (physical & online) that can create beautiful printed products (prints, canvas, key rings, mouse mats, photobooks, xmas cards etc) a lot cheaper than I can sell them for. When buying printed products from my company, I had to pay a printing lab to create them on my behalf, then add on my profit margin before selling them to my customers. Every time the printing lab increased their prices, this ate into my profit so I either had to absorb the increase or pass it on my customers. Increasing prices during the recent financial crisis hit my company and despite trying to absorb these increases to protect my customers it got to the stage where I had to make a choice - make my printed products more expensive or no longer sell them.

Not just price:

Time: Ordering, producing & posting printed products takes up a lot of physical time. Customers needing prints for Christmas presents for example meant I had to book my last photoshoots at the start of November to allow enough time. Selling the JPEG is immediate in comparison meaning I can book photoshoots up to mid December.
Choice: I used to sell photo prints in a variety of sizes plus other products such as on canvas, as a photobook, keyrings etc. I would, however, receive regular requests for prints in other sizes or other products. So anticipating what customers want is impossible.
Queries: I also looked at the number of queries I was answering and realised 90% were about print orders including 'where was the order', 'part of the order is missing', 'the prints are the wrong size' etc. Being the middle-man between my customers and the print lab meant I was constantly on the phone and writing emails. This added up to a lot of extra admin time not to mention that every error the print lab made, it was MY company who looked bad in the eyes of my customers. And no matter which printing lab I used, the queries were still the same.

My solution: I decided to give customers 100% control. Control over what products they bought and how much they spent. Let my customers choose where to get their prints from.

Pre-school & Nursery Photography:

Saving time & money through this decision has enabled me to reduce the cost of school photos. The pricing model used for preschool-nursery photography shoots is totally different to all my other photoshoots. As such I am able to sell a single JPEG for at least £10 less than for a private photoshoot. Why are school photos so cheap when the shoot is free to parents, I am not paid by the nursery or preschool (in fact I pay them 10% commission on sale of photos) and on a typical photo day of 60 children I am taking 5-10 images per child? To make this business model profitable, there is simply little to no editing involved and means I can get a typical gallery of preschool photos taken & ready to sell within 24 hours. A private shoot, where every single part of every single image is meticulously edited, can take a week to deliver and thus attracts higher prices.

Selling JPEGS not prints - Feedback from customers:

Part of my decision process involved looking at what customers were ordering. Over the last 10 years, I noticed that as time went on, the trend was shifting away from prints. More and more orders were for purely JPEGS. I also ask during the photoshoot what the customer will be using the photos for and the majority want the flexibility of owning the JPEG digital file.

Let's take a look at JPEGS. What are they? What are the benefits? etc...

What is a JPEG ?

I am not a technical expert and with 'google' at our fingertips, I will leave the in depth descriptions to them. The basics: JPEG is the name given to a digital photo file format and is an abbreviation for 'Joint Photographic Experts Group'. There are lots of other formats you can save digital photos as, (PNGS, DNGS, TIFFS) but I save my final images as JPEGS as they compress the picture so the files can be stored or emailed easily (i.e. the size of the file in Mega or Gigabytes isn't too large). You can tell if a photo has been saved as a JPEG the same way you can tell if a document is a PDF, excel spreadsheet or word document because after the file name is .PDF, .xls or .doc. A Jpeg file ends in .jpg

What can you do with a JPEG?

Maybe I should have called this section, What CAN'T you do with a JPEG... They are so useful, so flexible and offer customers so many options, the value for money speaks for itself.

Once you own the digital JPEG file, you can share that file (image) with family and friends via email by attaching the file to the email. You can attach photos to lots of different online communications including whatsapp and onto social media accounts and share as you would any photos you take with your mobile phone.

You can also get prints made from the file. I only charge you a one-off fee for the JPEG file but the photo products you can create from your JPEG are endless and there is no limit to the amount of prints you can get from that jpeg, forever. There are physical and online shops that create these products for you - some even print for free..

What can I do with a Print compared to a JPEG?

If I sold you print, then you own that print. You can pop it into a frame and display on your wall or gift it to a relative. You own that one copy only. It is against copyright law to make copies of that print so can you cannot photo it and share it online. You cannot take to a shop and get them to make copies from it as this is illegal. So you only have x1 photo.

That is why JPEGs are so valuable.