okay, what about the pictures on my SD card? Will I be able to see my pictures on my home computer if they've been on an encrypted SD cell phone card? If that answer is no, that means I won't be able to use my SD card to make any prints of my pictures, correct?  If that's the case, how do I unencrypt my SD card? Or how do I change the setting for saving my pictures to my SD card? If I do this, how can I ever make prints of any of my pictures? I admit I take many family pics bc no one lives close by ~ 
it would be so nice to see some of them framed and around the house instead of only getting to look at them while sitting at the computer. Thanks again
For the first part of the question -- if your SD card is encrypted, then it won't be readable on a computer, print kiosk, or other device unless that device has compatible encryption capability and you supply the key (not going to happen at the print kiosk at Target, sorry to say).

As far as I know, there's no feature given to decrypt an entire storage volume (like your SD card); the most practical way to get the images decrypted would be to copy then to an unencrypted storage device.  One way to do that would be to install a cloud storage app (like Dropbox) on your phone.  Don't encrypt the cloud storage, and anything you copy to the cloud will be accessible to any device that has access to that cloud storage.  Dropbox has an application for Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as both Android and iOS, which makes it a good choice (and it's free, with a fairly large storage limit, at least as of September 2017).  Some printing services will allow you to print from Dropbox storage, at least via their web page (Staples and Office Max/Office Depot allow this, as I recall).

Unless you also shoot porn on your phone or have a high enough profile to be concerned about blackmail, I don't see a lot of reason to encrypt storage of family photos anyway -- you might consider backing up your SD card (connecting the phone to a computer via USB cable may allow doing this without requiring the computer to deal with the encryption) and reformatting the SD storage without encryption.

Depending on your Android version, it may not be possible to store data (pictures, music, documents, etc.) on the SD card without adopting it, which encrypts it for unique access only by the adopting device.  If you're running Android 6 (Marshmallow) or newer, this might be the case (I can't check on my own device, as I have a Pixel which doesn't have an SD card slot).