Photo album storage professional#

Photo album storage professional#

But if you would like to give your photographs the best chance of lasting for hundreds of years, we offer a few techniques that are recommended by professional archivists. Photos you throw in a shoebox today are still likely to be in good condition in 30 years. “I think there’s a big risk of losing a lot of digital photography, unless you’re really good at keeping up with it and making backups and printing your favorites.” “We don’t know what form digital photography is going to take in 100 years, or whether our grandchildren are going to access our hard drives or cloud accounts,” Smithsonian Institution Archives photograph archivist Marguerite Roby says. But experts we spoke with from the Smithsonian Institution Archives and National Geographic agree: A print photograph can serve as a crucial backup to your digital collection and act as a way to interact with history, both for this generation and for those to come. In the age of boundless digital photograph storage, it can feel a bit old fashioned to worry about maintaining a print photograph collection. But it’s easy for the important photos to get lost when people save too many.

They also open a door to conversations about family with living relatives. After sorting through the houses of a few grandparents after their deaths, it’s become clear to me that print photographs can be a precious, tangible connection to the previous generation. Lately, whenever my mom brings up organizing the big blue bin, I suggest something drastic: Pick the five favorite photos from each year and trash the rest. But we could never bring ourselves to touch the big blue bin overflowing with stacks of photographs, its contents spanning several lifetimes’ worth of birthdays, vacations, and friendships. Every few years during my childhood, my family and I would purge as much as possible from our overstuffed garage.