Preserving Photos the 4 Must Do’s

Share, Share, Share

Family members may want their own copies of Grandma’s wedding album. You can scan and digitize prints and slides at home (a photo scanner starts at around $200), but if you have a lot of pics, send them to a company that provides digitization services such as ScanDigital or Heartland Box . Their standard resolution scanning service is perfect for sharing your images on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. Ask for the high resolution scanning service to have the ability to enlarge images beyond their original size.

 

Back It Up

To preserve your photos and memories , back up is important. Save slides and negatives in their original packaging. Save your digital images on not only your computers internal hard drive, but also to an external hard drive and a cloud storage, such as Drop Box, Google Drive or Flickr.

 

 Storage

Light, extreme of temperature (hot or cold) and humidity cause prints deteriorate when exposed in excess. Look for photo binders, envelopes, or archival boxes that will protect them and won’t cause fading or staining when storing them.

 

The Name Game

What’s the point of preserving photos for the future if no one knows what they are. Try labeling prints on an edge of the back using a felt-tip marker or pencil. The key is to make sure that whatever you use to write doesn’t fade over time. Also, instead of categorizing the photos chronologically, try sorting them into categories such as “Christmas”, “Birthday’s”, “Family”, or my favorite… “Meaningful Memories”.