A sight that immediately saddens me is finding stacks of family
photos for sale in antique stores; discarded because no one had a clue as to
who the people were in the photos. So let's get those photos out of your closet, out from under the bed, or out of your digital shoebox...and label them!
I’ve been a Creative Memories consultant for 20 years but
long before that I was a scrapbooker. My first camera was a Christmas present
from my uncle when I was eleven. My Brownie Instamatic and I took photos of Christmas Day, family,
schoolmates and vacations and put them all in a scrapbook. A cheap, black
scrapbook that years later I discovered was one of the worst environments in
which to put my photos. The acid on the
pages eventually caused the pictures to fade. Even worse, I attached the photos
to the pages with small, rolled-up pieces of cellophane tape. Yikes! That damage was
obvious a few years later when brown spots started appearing on the fronts of
the photos where the tape was stuck on the back. All my documentation was on the scrapbook page so when the photos were removed to prevent further damage, there were no names or dates on the photos.
My grandmother had a different method of identifying people in her photos for posterity. She certainly had the right idea, but she wrote on the front of the photos with cheap pens. Within a couple of decades the ink had bled and names became hard to read. Anything written on the back of the photo bled through to the front, effectively destroying the image.
We both loved our photos and tried to save them to enjoy in the future, but we didn’t realize what we were doing would damage the
very things we were trying to save. Luckily, the photo album/scrapbooking/memory-saving
industry has found ways to alleviate the problems my grandmother and I had with
our photos.
The first, and most important, thing to do with photos after
printing is to label them. Label them
completely. Use a photo-safe, soft leaded
pencil and write on the backs of photos for documentation. This type of pencil
won’t cause indentations to the front of the photo that a sharp, hard
instrument will and it will not bleed to the front of the photo.
Doing this could save your
photos from the antique malls of the future. And get those strangers out of your closet so you can enjoy your family photos for years to come.
