Looking for folks with framing knowledge. I am very into photography - or I should probably say used to be - and have a number of my photographs that I had printed with a Lightjet starting in the early 2000s. It seems like back then, 'plaque mounting' - although IIRC it had a different name, something like "laminate box mounting" - was all the rage. This is when the image is coterminous and coplanar to the black (usually) wooden box, glued on, and laminated for protection. You could get it at any custom framing shop and I'm pretty sure I also got one done at a chain like AC Moore. Now I've been calling around...almost nobody seems to know what it is...finally got a manager at a Michaels who was an old timer like me (I guess haha) who remember it being more common. She said they don't offer it but I might call a trophy shop because people sometimes use it for diplomas and sports certificates.

I can understand the concern might be that it isn't archival, but when done well it looked really good. Most of my lightjet prints have the intrinsic value of the printing itself, which ain't cheap, but I don't care if a process is non-reversible because I can always get another one printed. I own the digital files, obviously. My oldest one is from 1999 and it still looks just fine, the lamination hasn't faded or peeled or affected the image.

In the photographic arena, it might have been partly supplanted by the print directly on metal process, which has a similar net effect, but I've had trouble getting those to have the richness and color depth of real photographic paper like Fuji crystal archive. I'm going to try again one more time, bumping the saturation up beyond what looks good on my (calibrated) NEC IPS monitor.

So...has anybody else noticed that this has fallen out of a favor? I found a couple places to do it online and assume that will be my only option now...am happy to get any recommendations for a provider.