I love photography and I love to have my own photos around the home. But I noticed something that's changed in the past few years about the way that we appreciate photographs and it started to bug me. 

These days, the majority of photographs taken, say on a smart phone, go to one place, Instagram. Instagram says that there have been 30+ Billion photos shared through their app, with 70 million average photos a day. That's mind boggling!

Don't get me wrong, I love Instagram as much as the next guy, and I use it almost every day. The community that you're part of and the feedback you get for your photos is part of what makes Instagram awesome. 

However,  I do feel that we've kind of lost touch with the original premise of photography these days and it could be suggested that for the majority of the time, photographs are now taken for the amount of likes we think they'll get, rather than for appreciation of what's actually in the frame. 

Photographs are personal, meaningful and, most of the time, beautiful snapshots of a part of the past. To see their level of importance as a correlation with their number of likes on Instagram, just doesn't feel right. 

From having a quick look at the people that I follow on Instagram, I can see that most of them average over 600 pictures uploaded (myself included), but I wonder how many of these photos make up a part of their home decor?

By this I mean, how many of these people actually have physical copies of their photographs in their homes, offices, cars, wallets etc. I'd take a guess at very few. 

This is a topic that's pretty hot currently and the longevity and permanence of digital photographs have been questioned due to the pace at which technology moves. It may be that in ten years time, all of those images that you have from the early years of your son or daughters life become inaccessible, unusable or just plain disappear. The reality is, unless you have a hard copy in your hand, there's no guarantee that your snapshots will be around for years to come. Take a listen to this piece that recently featured on the Today programme, on BBC Radio 4. Jump to the 2.22.04 mark to hear a discussion about victorian photography and what some of the major societies and galleries are doing to safeguard against the loss of digital photographs in the future. 

Although there are some great photo printing sites out there which can do everything under the sun, my feeling is that it's the actual process of requesting these prints that puts people off the idea of owning physical copies of their photographs. And to be honest, it is a lengthy process with having to make an account, login, upload your photo (after spending hours looking for just the right one or transferring them from your phone), select your size, enter your shipping details then enter your payment details. Then there's the issue of having to find the right size frame for your photos and finding somewhere to hang them. 

This is where RetroPacks come in. RetroPacks is a monthly subscription service that, if you want it to, will be entirely automated. RetroPacks connects to your Instagram account and can choose from your most recent uploads each month, then print and ship three of them to you at the end of the month. 
Each print will be in the format of a Polaroid print. At this point, I'm having one format, the standard square format (overall size: 3.5 x 4.2 in  ). 

I'm also considering offering other sizes further down the road, however this is somewhat limited by the size of the images on Instagram as when they are stretched to higher resolutions, naturally, they loose a lot of their quality and begin to get pixelated.  Some testing on sizing would be needed to find out the upper limit of the print size. 

The Process

• Once you're signed up, authorise RetroPacks to have access to your Instagram feed (only read access at this point). This will allow RetroPacks to select your monthly set of photographs from your Instagram account. 
• Then select how you want your photos to be picked each month by using a number of different filters e.g. most recent, most commented on, most liked. You can also choose to select your images manually each month. The filter can be changed at any time, so don't worry if you change your mind later.  
•  Then you simply set up your monthly subscription payment through Paypal, and sit back and relax. Receive your monthly photo set and start bringing photographs back into your life. 

Advantages

• As you only upload your best and most meaningful photos to Instagram, there's no issues about having to pick your best pictures from an album of hundreds on your smart phone or computer. 
• It's a monthly rolling subscription. your photos from the previous month will be selected on the 1st of each month and dispatched shortly after.  Once it's set up, you don't have to do a thing!
• You can cancel your subscription at any time, with no extra cost. 

Ideas

• To create an ever growing Photo Wall  (my favourite).
• To create a physical photo album for your family and friends.
• To give as a gift to someone who loves photography.
• To document a trip you might be taking over the course of a few months. 
• To spread out the cost of accumulating a physical collection of your photographs. 
• To document the stages of a pregnancy or a newborn child's growth. 
• To simply get a nice surprise each month of pocket sized photos that you can give to family and friends or stick in your purse or wallet. 

Featured Member

Users will have the opportunity to opt in to a 'Featured User' scheme. Each month one of these users will be selected and have one of their images printed with their Instagram details, and sent out with every Retropack that month. This'll introduce a new way for Instagrammers to find new followers and further build on the Instagram, and Retropacks community. 

Costing

If the project is successfully funded, the funds raised will go towards the initial purchase of printing equipment and packaging. As a start I'm estimating 

• £300-£400 on the printer. A high quality photograph printer is needed to print the images in bulk.
• £200 on inks, paper, packaging and delivery of rewards to backers. Also to undertake testing and prototyping of the printing format and get an accurate understanding of cost/image.  

Naturally, all of the photography for the site and product shots will be undertaken by myself. 

Timeline

As of right now, the core functionality of the website, for automatically selecting the pictures to be printed as well as allowing users to manually select their pictures, is in place. This has been done by utilising the Instagram API and writing a script that automates the entire process of selecting a users filtered pictures from the previous month. 

I wanted to make sure this was nailed to begin with as it's a core feature of the service. Next on the timeline is testing and tweaking the visual design of the website. 

Online service

A large part of this service relies on a working website that provides users with a place to register, link their Instagram account and finalise their subscription. As an freelance web designer/developer myself, I will be undertaking this work and covering costs for the production and hosting of the website. This will be a bespoke site, coded from scratch to meet the needs of the service.

Proof of concept - Print design

I'm aiming to print on 250-300 gsm photo paper. This will be high quality professional standard, although I will do some testing in terms of the papers finish and will offer the option to choose the finish between Glossy and Matt. 

 Packaging

Proof of concept - Web service

This whole idea would go nowhere without a functioning, reliable website. The aim is to keep things simple and make signing up and using the service as fluid as possible. 

The website has been custom made and each line of code has been written by myself (no out of the box solutions here!!). 
Take a look at http://www.retropacks.com to see how things are coming along. The main functionality is pretty much in place and we are now testing for bugs and tweaking the visual design. 

There's a form you can fill out on the home page if you'd like to give some feedback or just say hey!

Reason for coming to Kickstarter

I'm a keen Instagrammer, and I have friends and family that use the app all the time. Retropacks is a service that I genuinely feel I would be willing to pay a monthly subscription for myself and I wanted to make sure that there is a market for the service out there. 

From speaking to friends, family and colleagues I've had some good feedback about the concept, but wanted to do this on a wider scale. This is why we've come to Kickstarter.

Kickstarter is known for it's awesome ability to build a community around new products and services and this is our aim for Retropacks. We want to build a passionate community around our service, of people who have a love for photography and want to share this love with others. 

At this point, we're not financially able to fully fund this project on our own and we're calling on the generosity and trust of our backers to bring this idea to life!

Stretch Goals

If we meet the initial funding target, we have some great ideas for additional options, formats and products that we could offer. 

• Investing more funds into customising packaging.
• Offering different formats of prints
• To offer different size plans in terms of the amount of photos you can receive a month.
• Having a shop alongside the monthly service that sells quality, low cost craft supplies for photo walls, scrap booking and other project materials.
• To integrate other photo sharing sites to allow printing from other sources