photo albums Archives - Save Your Photos

Jan 24 2018

Save Your Photos: Create Photo Albums

“Paper archives can survive centuries of benign neglect. Digital archives require careful management if they are to last more than a few years.” ~ Ancestry.com

We love this quote from Ancestry.com because it speaks to the importance of having some of your priceless memories in print. Your digital images will require careful management and your 3-2-1 backup plan and ongoing maintenance will help ensure the longevity of your images. When you create physical photo albums or photo books, you increase the odds that your family story and precious memories will succeed you!

Printed photo books, scrapbooks, and photo albums don’t rely on technology to enjoy them. You don’t need an internet connection, and you won’t need to migrate them to a new format to view them 50 years from now. When you combine images and words into a documentary-like narrative, you are creating a historical record for future generations with stories that you can celebrate and enjoy today.

The market is filled with an abundance of album choices to suit your needs. Scrapbook albums have the added benefit of providing you with a creative outlet. Pocket page albums make it easy to assemble an album quickly if time is an issue for you. Digital photo books make it easy and efficient to use online tools and templates to auto populate a photo book while you focus on the words that tell your story.

Tips for Photo Album Success

Quality matters! Choose products that have archive quality or photo safe materials to ensure the longevity of your albums.
Select album options that suit your lifestyle, budget and time considerations. Completion is the most important goal. If you don’t enjoy sitting at the computer to create a photo book, it will quickly become a chore. If you are frustrated by the creative process of assembling a scrapbook, it will slow you down. Make healthy choices!
Themes rather than chronology will make it easier to curate a story. Favorite topics include Vacations, Sports, Family Traditions or events like Weddings, Anniversaries and Birthdays. Choose the themes that are most common in your family and combine them into an album that spans over time.
If you prefer a chronological timeline, choose 10-15 photos per month for an annual Family Yearbook. Or choose 10-20 photos per year for a Celebration of Life.

The greatest reward for your effort will be the joy on the faces of your loved ones enjoying your photo albums!

We also invite you to visit our sister blog The Photo Organizers for more tips and in-depth knowledge from some of the top photo organizing industry professionals. To find a photo organizer near you, visit the Association of Personal Photo Organizers.

Nov 29 2017

Save Your Photos: The Chemical Sandwich of Magnetic Albums

Old magnetic or ‘sticky’ albums contain unsafe components that act like a ‘chemical sandwich’ for your photos. These pictures should be removed and scanned as quickly as possible.

The Downside of Magnetic Albums

As you organize and sort your photos, you may come across photos in old scrapbooks, pocket page albums and old magnetic albums that were popular about 25 – 30 years ago. Unfortunately, many of these albums may be accelerating the deterioration of your photos and you need to take steps to remove your pictures now.

The biggest offender is the magnetic or sticky album. The glue on the page surface, the acidic cardboard page and the plastic overlay create a ‘chemical sandwich’ that is rapidly destroying your photos.

If you have these albums in your collection, removing the photos is a priority! Some may be easy to remove, and some may be troublesome.

How to Remove Troublesome Photos

Here are a few tips as you approach this next step:

Find a photo in the album that is a ‘throw away’ and try to remove it first by gently lifting a corner. If it comes up easily without having to pull or curl the photo, then proceed.
If the picture is stuck, take a thin metal spatula and gently work under the photo, or slide a piece of unwaxed dental floss under the corner and gently saw back and forth to work through the adhesive.
Try heating the back of the photo slightly with a blow dryer then attempt the dental floss again. Or heat the metal spatula and use this to soften the glue as you work behind the photo.
Try using a product like Un-du which is an adhesive remover used by scrapbookers and safe to use on the backs of photos.

If all this fails, then leave your photos in the albums and make digital copies with a flatbed or mobile scanner.

Aug 18 2015

How To Rescue Photos from Magnetic Albums

This is a guest contribution from Meaghan Kahlo of Ephemera Photo Organizing.

Your parents almost certainly have some. Maybe you have a few. They seemed like such a good idea at the time! So affordable! How could we have known the problems they would cause?

Acidic, cardboard pages. Covered in yellowing, sticky adhesive. Encapsulated in plastic sheeting. Spiral bound or three-ring binders. The magnetic photo albums so ubiquitous in the 1970s.

Personal photo organizers, archivists and conservators all agree that these inexpensive albums are among worst places to store your precious family photos. Your photos desperately need to be rescued from these cheap and harmful albums that have been their home for the past several decades.

What kind of damage have these albums been causing to your photos over the years? The cardboard pages are highly acidic and seep peroxide, yellowing both black and white and color prints. The tacky glue that seemed like such a convenience is also highly acidic and will slowly deteriorate the prints. Additionally, the glue breaks down, hardens and fuses the photo to the page making it difficult to remove. The cheap plastic overlay to the pages exacerbates the deterioration of the photos by off-gassing and sealing harmful chemicals in close to the photo print itself. Deterioration of prints in this type of album is hastened further if the albums are stored in unstable environments like the attic or basement where temperature and humidity fluctuations can wreck even more havoc on fragile images.

Personal photo organizers, archivists and conservators have developed certain techniques to help release photos from pages of the destructive1970s magnetic albums. These techniques are employed with the intention to prevent further damage to the photos themselves.

Waxed dental floss has been an effective tool for releasing photos from the pages. Slide the dental floss under a corner of the photo and gently saw through the glue as you pull the floss behind the photo. Take care not to tear the photo paper or bend the photo and crack the emulsion surface. Sometimes a small hair dryer on low or warm will be helpful to soften the glue just enough to slide the floss through. Take care not to overheat the page or the photo causing additional damage.

A product called Un-Du is available, generally utilized to remove labels and stickers. Place a small drop of Un-Du on a rounded, dull crafting spatula and slide the tool through the glue to help release a photo. Take care to use the smallest effective amount of Un-Du with each photo.Some pages will likely release the photos easier than others. Others could be a bit of a struggle. If the photo or photos are stuck hard to the page or to each other, scanning the entire page may be the simplest approach.

Finally, take care to preserve any notes or inscriptions from the album that go along with the photos before discarding the old pages. Sometimes this style of album just had a paper sheet at the beginning of the album where dates, places and names for each album page could be listed.

Take some time today and you can rescue your precious photos from a terrible fate of languishing in the harmful magnetic albums of the past.

Meaghan Kahlo, owner of Ephemera Photo Organizing of Seattle, WA, began her professional life with graduate work in museum studies focused on collections management. Her enthusiasm for photography and historical preservation combined with a passion to organize and create order are the driving forces behind her business. Meaghan helps clients transform the ephemeral nature of digital and printed images into meaningful photo solutions.