Every family has the same shoebox: prints curled at the edges, envelopes of negatives nobody labelled, and a plastic album where the pages have gone sticky and fused to the photographs. The pictures are not lost yet, but they are on a clock. Dye-based colour prints from the 1970s and 1980s drift towards magenta, then fade into a yellow ghost, and once the highlight detail is gone no scanner can invent it back.
Scan at a resolution you will not regret
Resolution is the one decision you cannot undo, so pick it by the source rather than by the file size you want.
- A 4×6 inch print at 600 dpi yields roughly 2400 x 3600 pixels — enough to reprint at 8×10 without visible softening.
- 35mm slides and negatives need 2400 to 3200 dpi, because the frame is only 24 x 36 mm and the same pixel count demands a far higher setting.
Save the master as TIFF or PNG at 24-bit colour, then make JPEG copies at quality 90 for sharing. Scanning straight to JPEG discards data on every re-save, and a 1998 JPEG of a 1962 wedding is a dead end.
A flatbed scanner at $100–150 (roughly BDT 12,000–18,000) beats a phone because the light is fixed and the print stays flat. Photographing photos picks up glare from the emulsion, bows the geometry into a keystone, and casts the colour of the wall behind you. If a phone is all you have, work in overcast daylight, hold the camera parallel using a stack of books as a guide, switch the flash off, crop afterwards. A workable pace on a flatbed is 30 to 50 prints an hour, so start with the hundred that matter, not the whole box.
Keep the originals and store them properly
Scanning makes a copy, not a replacement. A 600 dpi scan captures most of what a print holds, but the print carries more tonal range and the negative more again, so nothing here justifies binning the originals.
Storage is where home archives quietly fail. Use acid-free, lignin-free boxes and envelopes, and avoid the self-adhesive “magnetic” albums entirely — the PVC pages release plasticiser that migrates into the emulsion and welds print to plastic. If pages are already stuck, do not peel them; scan through the plastic or take the album to a conservator.
Aim for a stable 18–21°C (65–70°F) and 30–50% relative humidity. That rules out the attic, which touches 40°C in summer, and the basement, which cycles through damp. No rubber bands or tape and no marker pen, which bleeds through; label with a soft pencil on the back edge. The Library of Congress publishes a detailed guide to caring for photographs if you want the materials list in full.
Name and tag so the archive outlives you
Folders by decade, then year: 1980s/1987_Christmas/. Inside, a filename that answers the obvious questions in order — 1987-12-24_Christmas_Evesham_Grandma-Nora_003.tif. Date first for sorting, then event, place, people, and a sequence number for the batch.
Where the date is unknown, write 1987-xx-xx instead of guessing a month; a wrong precise date is worse than an honest gap. Put names in metadata as well as filenames: Windows Explorer → Properties → Details → Tags, or macOS Photos → Info → keyword. Face grouping in Google Photos or Apple Photos is convenient but vendor-locked, and a typed name travels with the file.
Drop a plain text file in the root folder called what-is-in-this-archive.txt: which decades are covered, which relatives appear, and which cupboard holds the physical prints. Whoever inherits this will not have your memory of it.
Three copies, and one of them off-site
The old rule still holds: three copies, on two kinds of media, with one in a different building. A single external drive is one copy however large it is.
- Working copy: an external SSD attached to the family computer, holding the TIFF masters.
- Second copy: a spinning external hard drive kept at a relative’s house and swapped every six months. Two drives in the same room die in the same fire.
- Third copy: cloud storage. Google Photos compresses anything above 16 megapixels under its storage-saver setting and counts original quality against the 15 GB shared with Gmail; iCloud+ and Backblaze B2 (about $6 per terabyte per month) are the alternatives.
Do the arithmetic first. Forty thousand scans at 20 MB each is roughly 800 GB — expensive in the cloud, trivial on a drive. Upload JPEG derivatives, keep the TIFFs local, and let the cloud hold the version you can browse. A shared album is the practical way to get cousins contributing their own copies, and the iPhone backup checklist covers the phone half of the same job.
Then verify. Twice a year, open ten random files from each copy. Bit rot, a dying USB stick and a half-finished sync all fail silently; a backup you have never opened is a rumour, not a backup.
Deal with the damaged ones before scanning
Skip the home remedies. Water, alcohol wipes and “photo cleaning” sprays lift the gelatin emulsion, and a print that survived fifty years in a shoebox can be destroyed in ten seconds by a well-meant cloth. Scan the damaged original at maximum resolution now; restoration in Photoshop’s Healing Brush or the free GIMP can work from that file later, and aged colour casts correct far better after scanning than by reprinting.
Cracked, torn or mouldy prints are a conservator’s job, usually quoted per item — worth it for one wedding portrait, not a box of snapshots. Send the scan, keep the original, and never let anyone dry-mount a print to tidy it up.