Preserve Old Family Photos: A Beginner-Friendly Guide

Learning how to preserve old family photos takes an afternoon to start and protects a hundred years of faces. Here is the order to do it in, and the settings that matter.

Somewhere in your house there is a box. Shoeboxes, mostly, but also sometimes a biscuit tin or perhaps a suitcase that has not been opened since the last house move. Inside are the only surviving pictures of people nobody left alive can name.

That box is on a ticking clock. Color prints from the 1970s and 80s are fading and deteriorating as you read this, sleeves made of the wrong plastic are sticking to your prints, and the attic where those photos are stored swings forty degrees between July and January. Fortunately, the fix is not complicated. To preserve old family photos properly, you just need a sequence of steps, but most people get them in the wrong order. They start scanning before they have sorted, and give up somewhere around picture two hundred.

Quick Jump — Table of Contents

• → Why This Cannot Wait Another Winter
• → What You’ll Need Before You Start
• → Step 01 — Sort Before You Scan Anything
• → Step 02 — Handle Them Without Doing Damage
• → Step 03 — Scan at the Right Settings
• → Step 04 — Name the Files So You Can Find Them
• → Step 05 — Back Up in Three Places
• → Step 06 — Store the Originals Properly
• → What Happens After You Preserve Old Family Photos

Why This Cannot Wait Another Winter

Photographs do not fail all at once. They deteriorate slowly over time, and mostly because of where they are kept. The Library of Congress recommends storing prints somewhere relatively dry and cool: 30 to 50% relative humidity, 70°F or below. Most importantly, the temperature should be stable, with humidity changing less than 5% in any 24 hours. An attic meets none of those conditions. Neither does a basement, a garage, or the cupboard built up against the outside wall.

Then there is the packaging. Magnetic albums, the ones with the sticky card and the clear film flap, sold by the million in the 1970s, are the single worst thing that ever happened to family photographs. The adhesive yellows, hardens, and eventually bonds to the back of the print. Older PVC sleeves do something similar from the front. If your box contains either, it moves your photos to the top of the queue.

So the honest answer to “when should I start” is this winter, before the next big temperature change. However, you do not have to do all of it at once. One evening spent sorting is progress. One tray of scans is another step forward. Doing something consistently is better than doing nothing at all.

What You’ll Need Before You Start

Very little, as it turns out. Almost everything you need to preserve old family photos is already in the house.

For the sorting stage

• → A clean, dry table with nothing on it: no coffee, remove plants, and “shoo” the cat away.
• → Half a dozen shallow trays or lids to sort into, plus a soft pencil for the backs.

For the scanning stage

• → A flatbed scanner. An all-in-one printer works perfectly well for prints; a dedicated film scanner only matters if you have negatives and slides. I have an older version of this Epson Perfection V600 scanner, but you’ll find more options in this 10 Best Flatbed Scanners comparison
• → An external hard drive, and a cloud account you already pay for.

You might also want a microfiber cloth for the scanner glass and, if you can find them, a pair of nitrile gloves. Cotton gloves are traditional, but they snag on brittle edges, so nitrile is the better choice. Beyond that, patience and a podcast or music to listen to.

Step 01

Sort Before You Scan Anything

This is where almost everyone goes wrong. Scanning is the slow part, so scanning things you did not need to keep is how a project dies. Sort first. Always.

Write names and approximate dates on the back with a soft pencil while the pile is in front of you, and keep to the very edge of the photo. Avoid using a ballpoint and never a marker.

Anna’s Personal Opinion: You should be able to sort a box across four evenings. Two hours is about the limit before you stop looking properly and might skip something important.

Step 02

Handle Them Without Doing Damage

Fingerprints are oil, and oil etches emulsion over time. The rule, therefore, is simple: hold prints by the edges, with clean, dry hands or nitrile gloves, and keep your fingers off the image side entirely.

Dust comes off with a puff of air from a rubber bulb used for camera lenses. Try not to brush it, and don’t blow on it, because breath carries moisture. Paper clips, sticky notes, tape and rubber bands all leave permanent marks, so remove any you find and avoid adding new ones.

Note that torn photographs should be scanned before repair and not after. In fact, a good scan of a torn print is often easier to mend digitally than the original ever will be physically, and the repair costs and risks nothing.

Step 03

Scan at the Right Settings

This is where people get it wrong and only discover years later, when they try to print a scanned image at album size, and it’s not large enough. Get the settings right once and save them as a preset, so you don’t have to think about it.

Save the master ideally as a TIFF. They are larger in file size and take up more space on your hard drive but a JPG  loses detail every time the file is re-saved. The optimum choice is to keep the TIFF as the archive and make JPGs from it for use in your memory-keeping, but I’ll leave that decision to you.

Scan black-and-white photographs in color rather than grayscale. Old monochrome prints carry sepia shifts, silvering, and paper tone that grayscale flattens out, and you cannot get that information back later. Meanwhile, turn every automatic correction off such as dust removal, sharpening, color restore, backlight correction. Those tools guess, and a guess baked into your archive master is permanent. Correct later, on a copy.

Clean the glass between batches, and scan four to six prints at a time rather than one, using your scanner software’s option to save each as a separate file.

Anna’s Personal Opinion: Phone scanning apps have improved, and for a first pass through a hundred loose snapshots I would absolutely try one such as Photomyne. But for the photographs that really matter — the wedding, the new baby, the grandmother nobody has a good picture of scanning at 600DPI is the better approach. The difference shows the moment you enlarge a face. Don’t want to invest in a scanner or spend your time scanning? Send them to ScanCafe as I did.

Step 04

Name the Files So You Can Find Them

A folder of 400 files called scan0001.tif is not an archive. It is a second shoebox, and it is harder to browse than the first one was.

Use a pattern that sorts itself chronologically: year, surname, description, number. So 1952-holloway-wedding-church-steps-01.tif and 1968-holloway-caravan-wales-03.tif. When you only know the decade, write 1950s. When you know nothing, write the earliest plausible decade and add a question mark in the description rather than leaving the date blank.

Then keep the folder structure boring: one folder per family surname, subfolders by decade. Boring survives while complex systems only make sense to the person who invented them. The whole point of this exercise is that somebody else will inherit these photos.

Finally, put the names you collected in Step 01 somewhere that travels with the files. A plain text file or a simple spreadsheet in the same folder does the job, listing filename, who is in it, where, and roughly when. Of course you can also write into the file’s own metadata, but a text file next to the photos is readable in fifty years by anyone.

Step 05

Back Up in Three Places

A scan saved in one place is not preserved. It is simply somewhere else, waiting for a hard drive to fail, which they do without warning, about every four years.

Archivists typically use the 3-2-1 rule, and it is worth borrowing: three copies of everything, on two different kinds of storage, with one of them somewhere else entirely. In practice, that usually means the computer, an external drive in a drawer, and a cloud account. The “somewhere else entirely” matters more than people expect, because a house fire or a burst pipe takes the computer and drawer all at once

• → Test the backup once a year by opening three files at random from the copy you never touch.
• → Replace external drives every five years, whether or not they have misbehaved.

A fourth copy on a drive at a sibling’s house costs almost nothing and covers the case where the cloud account lapses because nobody remembered the password. Consider it, particularly for the small set of photographs you would be heartbroken to lose.

Step 06

Store the Originals Properly

The scans are safe now, so the originals can go back into storage, just not the storage they came out of.

Choose enclosures that meet the ISO 18902 standard, which is the specification photo-safe suppliers quote on the packaging. Acid-free paper enclosures and uncoated plastics such as polyester, polyethylene, polypropylene are all suitable. Anything that smells of vinyl is not. Keep negatives in separate boxes from prints, since the two age differently and negatives can off-gas onto neighboring paper.

Then put the boxes in the coolest, driest, most boring part of the house. An interior closet on the main floor beats the attic every time. Avoid exterior walls, heating vents, and anywhere a pipe runs overhead. Color prints in particular last dramatically longer in cold storage, although a stable spare bedroom cupboard is a perfectly respectable outcome for a family archive.

Anna’s Personal Opinion: It’s tempting to display heritage prints in your home, but it’s better to swap them for high-quality reprints of the scans. Daylight fades originals faster than anything else on this list, and once you have a good scan, there is no reason to hang the irreplaceable copy on the wall.

What Happens After You Preserve Old Family Photos

You preserve old family photos so that you can use them. Preservation is the insurance policy but rarely gives the images purpose. The point is that a scanned photograph can finally be used, enlarged, repaired, placed beside the details that explain it, and printed into something a grandchild will see and learn about his/her family heritage and stories.

That is where digital scrapbooking comes in, and it’s nowhere near as complicated as it sounds. If the whole idea is new to you, start with what digital scrapbooking actually is, then work through the first seven days for beginners.

For the heritage side specifically, I have written about what to do with old family photos once they are scanned, and there is a step-by-step tutorial on building a heritage collage page. If the modern half of your photo problem is also unsolved, what to do with all your photos covers the other end of the shelf.

Start with one photograph, rather than the whole box, and go for one you already know the story behind. Everything else follows from there.