I personally store my printer paper and photo paper in an "under the bed" tote. It's not totally air sealed, but it is close. With life expectancy of photos no one really knows. We users are still in the infancy stage of printing at home. I have read articles where Kodak and Fuji have claimed that commercially developed pictures will long outlast printer generated photos. Of course, this could be self-serving. Several years ago HP declared its photo paper and ink 25 (or 30 year?) life expectancy. My thoughts then is who really knows. We can store on CD/DVD, but again who really knows the time frame before degradation begins. My gut feeling is that with paper and printer quality as it is today in 75-100 years from now the preservation will not be as we have had in the previous century. Our only hope is the computer future bring users a new system that will be unveiled to permanently store our memories and retain them.

There are lots of decent photo printers out there. Which one you pick depends in part on how much you want to spend and in part on how large your DIL will want to print. If she's doing photo shoots with clients, my guess is that she'll want to have the option to print big. I have this one, and can recommend it highly. It prints up to 13 x 19". Because of this, the printer itself takes up a lot of room. It wouldn't do for a small desk. The Canon line of photo printers has a good reputation. You might do an Amazon search and check out the different models and reviews. Epson has a good rep, too, but I don't recommend it because of so many reports of ink clogs if the printer isn't used often enough. I had an HP photo printer for years and was happy with it, but I don't know anything about their current line. One possibility is that your DIL might want to print her own occasionally, and for casual photos, but send the pro images out. That's what I did when I was exhibiting, uploading my image files to Mpix.com. They do beautiful work. You sound like a good mother-in-law!

I have owned three Epsons and while they were superior to the print output of an HP I was able to try at home, I too noticed the ink dries quickly in them if you don't print often. I also found they were not very intuitive setting up for printing on 4"x6" photo paper. That may have changed/improved since I used my Epson (7+ years ago) but I still want to avoid one because of the ink issue. I'm going to do some comparisons with Canon and HP printers today and make a decision soon I hope. I am in the process of (re)starting my own home-based design business again. I had it for eight years before accepting an offer I couldn't refuse from a high tech company 7 years ago. I left them in September 2012 and wanted to get my travel to Southeast Asia out of the way before I got serious about going back to work.

I have always been a fan of the high end HP printers however last August when I moved from Ohio to Massachusetts my good printer somehow got packed in a container of household goods that was not scheduled to arrive here for another 6 weeks. For the first two weeks I was selecting photos to print and putting then on a flash drive which i then took to WalMart or my local camera store for printing but that was a real PITA. I happened to be in Staples on an unrelated errand and I saw a Kodak ESP 7250 printer scanner on sale for $99. I needed a new scanner so I thought what the heck, I'll try it. Right out of the box with the sample Kodak paper that came with the printer I was impressed, then I printed a couple 8x10 with some generic glossy photo paper and the best I could say is, they sucked. I went in the printer setup and changed from draft to Best quality, but with the generic paper the prints were still a mess, often coming out with way too much ink, feeling wet and they smudged when you touched them. Well, as they say, when all else fails, read the directions. I read the directions and did the setup routine to match the printer & paper, but even though it improved, I was still not happy. As I read the directions it said that Kodak recommended using only Kodak Paper, but who pays attention to that. That is just to promote purchasing their products, right? WRONG- In further reading I discovered that Kodak Papers have a bar code printed on the back side of the paper. The printer reads that code and sets up the printer to the specific needs of that paper whether you use MATT, Semi-Gloss or Glossy paper. In fact, I used glossy in the 4x6 tray and Matt in the 8x10 tray and it worked fine. Here is the catch I thought. They offer cheaper ink but get it back on higher priced paper, but to my surprise, when I priced the Kodak Paper at WalMart it was slightly cheaper than the HP paper. I then printed 2 8x10 and 6 4x6's on this printer, then put the photos on my flash drive and had them printed at both Walmart & Staples to compare print quality. To my surprise the prints from my printer were equal to or better than those from the commercial printers.