Stop Hoarding Photos On Your Phone With This App That Prints Them For Free

You probably have a few gigabytes worth of kids photos on your smartphone and here’s a mild spoiler: the people who really want to look at them don’t want to see them for three seconds before you put the phone back in your pocket. Those people would greatly prefer glossy, beautiful, museum-quality photo prints that they can put on their mantels and work desks. Everyone else would prefer you stop showing them pictures of your kid. The new Flag app has your parents/in-laws/spouse/siblings’ back.

Download the Flag app and select 20 photos from your phone, upload them, and you’ll get 20 photo prints mailed to you on thick, Felix Schoeller digital-specific photo paper, which boasts eight times the color detail of all that lesser paper you stopped using after you got an iPhone. Come to think of it, Flag has your back, too, because this whole enterprise — including the shipping — costs you exactly $0.00. And next month, you can do the whole thing over again and get 20 different prints. So what’s the catch?

The catch is each print comes with an advertisement on the back (somebody has to pay for all that fancy paper). You can view this one of two ways: Either, “I don’t want targeted direct mail on one side of my beautiful photos!” or “I get targeted direct mail every day. It may as well have an awesome photo of my kid that I can give to my parents on one side of it.”

If you go with the latter approach and order some sweet prints up, you can be confident knowing that Flag claims the prints are so high-quality, they’ll last 300 years. And that means, sometime in the distant future, your great-great-great-great-grandchildren will be asking, “What’s a Squarespace?”

Flag (free) (iOS)