So you have old family pictures, shoe boxes full to be exact, and you feel like they are nicely stored away for safe keeping. I’m here to tell you, that may not be the case.
After Hurricane Ian I spent months helping people to try to save their flood damaged photographs. The flooding caused all sorts of problems to pictures. The mud and debris left many unrecognizable. Some families had all of the contents of their home washed away, photos included. Just yesterday I had a woman reach out to me because she found a bag of negatives in one of the local canals. Unbelievable that almost a year later these items are still just washing back up.
Although those were situations I encountered they weren’t what I saw the most. The problem that people reached out to me the most for help with was because their pictures were stuck together.
When photographs get wet, or even just a little damp, and then dry together in a stack they will stick together. Now I’m not talking like a sticker that you peal apart. They dry together like a brick and pulling them apart can destroy them.
I saw several situations where a family had pictures in a box stuck together but also photo albums that went through the same conditions. The photos in the album would only be minimally damaged, while the box was mostly destroyed. The photographs were protected by the album pages. That prevented them from sticking together.
It didn’t matter they type of box. Plastic tubs to shoe boxes, all it took was a little moisture and they were glued together.
You may not live in hurricane or flood prone areas, but this is still something to think about when securing your own pictures. I have since talked to people who had pictures that got damp for all sorts of reasons, some not even knowing why or how. They just opened up the box to find several special memories sticking together.
Sadly, photographs that have dried together were the hardest to restore. The ones that I was able to break apart often needed extensive retouching after to then fix the damage that was caused to the image during the separating process.
After seeing first hand that a photo album with sleeves was enough to save so many pictures I became a huge advocate for putting pictures in albums. If you still have those old boxes of photographs I suggest first, getting a digital copy of each picture. That is the number one way to secure and save your pictures. Then, take those special ones and put them into photo albums. You never know what situation your pictures will encounter, but I feel confident that they are much safer when they are stored in photo albums.