Preserving Your Photo Album: 4 Things To Avoid
Once you've stored your precious family photos in the right photo album, it's important to care of the album itself. This will ensure that the photos stay well-preserved regardless of surrounding conditions. Our guide tells you the basics for storing your photo albums for proper preservation.
Organizing your photos in a durable, archival-quality photo album is the key step in keeping them preserved. But once the photos are in the albums, you should also make sure you take proper care of the albums themselves. Here are a few key rules for storing your photo albums to ensure the longevity of your favorite snapshots.
Avoid extreme temperatures
Don't store photo albums in garages, attics, or basements if at all possible. All of these places experience major temperature changes throughout the year, and very cold or very hot temperatures can spoil the paper the photos are printed on and lead to degradation of the images.
Avoid moisture
Another reason to avoid the basement? Sometimes basements flood. Just like any other important document, your photos can be ruined in an instant by water or moisture. Keep in mind that humidity counts as moisture, so a hot wet area, such as one near a bathroom or radiator, isn't a good idea.
So where you should you store your photo albums? Most people keep them in a closet on the main level of the house, or on a bookshelf along with other volumes. Both of these methods will be fine, but there are a few other points to remember while doing this.
Avoid pressure
The best way to store photo albums is vertically, as they would be if they were lined up on a bookshelf. Even if you keep them in the closet, try to line them up vertically. This is because keeping them flat encourages stacking, and this causes pressure on the pages. Pressure on a photo album causes the pages to stick together, leading to damaged photos. For this same reason, avoid using rubber bands or straps to hold the photo albums closed. The pages will most likely hold themselves slightly open when the photo album is full. This is natural, and you shouldn't try to bind the book flat.
Avoid direct sunlight
For true archival quality storage, your photos should be kept somewhere dark and comfortably dry.Sunlight will fade and damage the photos over time. If you have a photo album with priceless heirloom snapshots inside, consider purchasing a durable firesafe box (or at the very least a dust-proof storage box) and placing the albums inside, then placing the box inside a closet. Remember not to stack albums on top of each other inside, and label the box so that nothing heavy winds up on top of it.
