Rescue Your Important Photos from the Cruel Fate of Deterioration

It seems like I’ve been heading out to visit relatives on the holidays for more than 50 years…Actually, I have! We all have--whether for 50 years or less. There are certain days of the year you get dressed nicely, pack up and go.

The one thing most of our holiday celebrations have in common is that someone takes a picture of someone. Sometimes, the celebration included a large amount of picture taking. People who are now passed on or are quite old today were young back in those photos. Real depictions of our lives could be found in the composition and the background of those pictures. And, for all of us, any photo taken prior to the last 10 years was probably done via film and printed on paper.

Where did we put those important, isolated stories of our lives? For most people, they wound up in boxes and stored in the basement or attic. Those seeking to display or protect those photos would put them in albums first and then put them in the boxes in the basement or the attic.

Over time, people died or divorced or moved and those photos were shuffled around to different places—different basements or attics. As the photos grew more distant in time from the day they were taken, we tended to treat them with less care than the ones recently snapped.

The bottom line is our photos were being destroyed. Many already are and many will be there soon. What’s worse, we may have originally thought we were protecting them by putting them in albums when, instead, we were actually dooming them to become faded, colorless blobs with little or no relevance.

Here’s why and what you ought to do about. When we put our “best” or most important photos in albums we didn’t realize the poly vinyl chloride in the plastic would literally suck the color and the luminance of the photo right out. So the first thing to do is get them out the albums and into Ziploc bags. You could take the opportunity of getting them scanned at the Scan Zone (1,000 photos for $250), but the most important thing is to get them out of those albums.

Once scanned, you could create digital photo albums that are easily accessible online. They could be available publicly or in a password protected location. Or, if you want, you could have the digital images made into a physical photo book. More than that, you could even put them back into an environmentally safe album, without the chemicals or adhesives that marred the original album.

If your boxes are down in the basement or in the attic, get them out of there. You could get them scanned onto DVD and put one copy in a safe deposit box and one in your computer or online service. Then if you still want the physical photos, put them in Ziplocs and store them in a cool dry place that’s not subjected to too many temperature changes. A closet works. Keep in mind though, the best those photos will ever look is today. They will be subject to additional deterioration even if you seek to protect them.

That’s why scanning them to DVD is important. They will be improved and even rescued via the scan and they will be stored in a way where they will be safe. Every decade or so, you can make copies of the discs using the best technology of the time and they will easily last, without deterioration, for a half century or more.

Most of those smiling, happy older people in our photos are gone now. Sometimes the generations after ours won’t even know who they are. By digitizing them, labeling them and storing them, they will live on for generations. Think about that when someone takes your picture today. And don’t forget to kiss your old, sweet aunt.