Amazon prints: the ultimate backup?

<p>I have a digital backup scheme as good as anyone's, involving multiple cloud storage providers and various levels of local disk.</p>

<p>But some say that for important family photos, there's nothing like prints. Prints have other uses, too, of course.</p>

<p>Recently, like a few days ago, Amazon announced a printing service that costs only 9 cents a print for a 4x6, which is much cheaper than anyone else. Shipping is free, too. And, the file you've printed stays on the Amazon cloud, making yet another cloud storage for me (CrashPlan + Amazon S3 + Amazon cloud). (I have Amazon Prime, so I don't pay anything, or at least not very much, for this service.)</p>

<p>If you like, you can just export JPEGs from Lightroom and upload them, using an app from Amazon that seems to run very well. But, I wanted the date on each photo. Ideally on the back, but Amazon doesn't allow that. So, I put it on the front, centered on the lower edge.</p>

<p>The problem is that Amazon crops all photos that aren't in a 4:6 ratio, often cropping out the date. And, I don't want my photos cropped at all. So, in the Lightroom export dialog, I used LR/Mogrify 2 to add the date and center the photo on a 4x6 canvas. Lots of horsing around to get it right, but now I've got it. My setup is shown in two photos attached, along with a sample.</p>

<p><img src="http://basepath.com/public/Capture1.JPG" alt="" width="400" /><br /> <img src="http://basepath.com/public/Capture2.JPG" alt="" width="400" /><br /> <img src="http://basepath.com/public/MJR_20140127_0092x.jpg" alt="" /></p>

<p> </p><div></div>

<p>Is there anything left that Amazon doesn't have a hand/foot in? ;-)<br>

Thanks for that info. I might try this as well, and your how-to was very helpful.</p>

<p>Neat trick and useful info! But why would you want to stick a date on the front of a nice photo? I've just picked up one of those awful 35mm data backs for my F100 - it turns out to be easier to find than a replacement plain back, and I'm intending to keep it switched off! The F5 had a more sophisticated data back that could print between frames instead of inside the image area. Would something a bit like that be an option for you? - i.e., always have a border around the image, whether cropped or not, and stick the date in the border. 4x6 ratio images would have to be shrunk a little and have borders on all sides, but at least the date wouldn't mess with the image itself. I'm not familiar with Mogrify so I'm not sure how easy this would be to achieve, and you'd also have to experiment with the print service to see if any of the edges are clipped (commercial services may crop slightly even if the aspect ratio matches the paper).</p>

<p>Richard--</p>

<p>The sample I posted here isn't typical of the ones I'm printing, which are family photos. I didn't want to post a family photo here.</p>

<p>For those, the integrity of the image is of minor concern, and the date is very important.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, with LR/Mogrify 2 in Lightroom, it's not possible to put the date in the border, and many images don't have a suitable border anyway.</p>