I get it, we moved to the Netherlands in 2023 with only a handful of albums and printed photos. Shutterfly or Walmart was the go-to when we needed photos printed back home, but trying to get our photos printed here was daunting.

Now that I am a family photographer, here are where I suggest printing your photos, the budget option or the high-end heirloom option.

Kruidvat

Your local Kruidvat should have a photo printer in the store with a phone plug in so you can choose which photos you’d like to print directly. These will usually be the glossy prints that you’re familiar with, the 5x7in kind that used to come in a paper envelope. They’re sturdy and they get the job done, they’re great for scrapbooking or hanging in smaller frames.

In case your Kruidvat’s machine doet het niet, you can also order prints online and they will deliver them to your home. We did this method for personal touches on our gallery wall, and I think they turned out fine! Despite being a fine art photographer and loving heirloom albums, I get decision paralysis on my own home decor, and having a cost effective option is great because I can always switch it out later.

We printed a big photo of the four of us on my son’s birthday and a southern heirloom-style portrait of our cat, Pepper, and the total was around €7. Can’t beat that.

Print&Bind

This is a more local Amsterdam option, but Print&Bind will also get the job done! Again, these are going to be basic, glossy prints, but they will work just fine to put in a slide-in album or to frame on the wall. I use Print&Bind for my business cards and flyers and I love the results. My photos are always the correct colors (this is a huge deal when printing carefully edited photographs).

The Heirloom Option

I’ll be honest. We got married at 21 and 20, we were so young that I was technically my husband’s chaperone on our honeymoon cruise. We got pregnant six months later. And while we had all the necessities we could ever want, we were not shelling out the money for quality newborn photos or heirloom albums. We had a family member come over and take photos of Art on a white sheet on the floor of his room while he was still ity-bity, and I never saw a single one of those photos.

Now, I do have 70+ GB of iPhone photos of his newborn stage on my phone (currently clogging up most of my storage and bricking up my phone every two weeks), but I wish we did have something really nice to remember both their early years.

Heirloom Albums

I just, like literally yesterday, got in my sample albums and they’re everything I wanted them to be. I design the covers myself, I can put any little graphic on there you’d like. I adore a cute woodland animal or a flower, but I’m happy to make mock ups of anything you’d like. Here is a link to an Instagram reel of me opening the samples so you can see what they look like.

I would have loved to have a lush, luxurious photo album like this of our boys as newborns to display on our coffee table or to look at with them snuggled in my lap.

I will take, edit, and upload professional photos of the sample albums in a few days. (My IKEA closet decided to collapse and we’ve been dealing with finding replacement dressers, purging half our clothes, and rearranging the new furniture since yesterday. Side note, but I love how we found two wooden dressers within walking distance for €60 total. I mean, I do miss our pick-up truck from Alabama in these scenarios, but this also okay.)

Heirloom Prints

Why would you pay for expensive prints over significantly cheaper alternatives? And the answer is high quality paper and frames.

I am thrifty. I have not assimilated to Dutch culture, I am half-Indian and half-redneck, and we loveeee a bargain. I don’t love it when the frame I just bought from Action breaks in half when I’m tearing off the plastic. I don’t love it when I’m changing out the photos and the little metal tabs decide to break off because they have a limited number of times they can be bent before they snap in half, rendering the entire frame useless.

You want quality to actually last, to be a one-and-done solution. I want to hang something on my wall and never have to think about replacing it again.

With heirloom-quality prints and albums, they are sturdy, made from real wood and metal, not plastic. They have a thick framing matte, not a piece of watercolor paper you meticulously measured and cut with a kitchen knife on a cutting board (true story). The paper options are gorgeous. (Can paper be gorgeous? I think it can.) They have this thick, pulpy matte prints that don’t catch glares and look fantastic on the wall. You can always also do a glossy print, but I prefer matte for my work.

And there you have it! Let me know if this helped, or if you still have questions about paper types! Feel free to message me over IG.

If you want to read more about my photography and the services I offer, you can head on over to my home page here.