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Guide · Preserving Family Photos

The shoebox is an archive. Treat it like one.

In a closet in your family sits a box of photographs no museum holds and no algorithm can recreate — the only surviving faces of people whose blood you carry. Water, heat, tape, and time are working against that box right now. One good weekend can put generations of faces beyond their reach.

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First, do no harm

• Clean, dry hands; hold by the edges. Skin oil is acid on a sixty-year-old print. No food or drinks at the table.
• Never tape, glue, or "fix" a damaged photo. A torn photo is stable; a taped one is dissolving. Scan it as it is.
• Ease, don't force. Photos stuck to album pages or to each other tear when pulled. If it resists, scan it in place — through the album plastic if you must. A slightly glossy scan beats a destroyed original.
• Move the box out of danger today — out of the attic (heat), the basement (water), the garage (both). A closet shelf in the living space is a fine archive while you work.

Sort lightly, then scan

Do not stall for a perfect system — sorting is where photo projects go to die. Make rough piles by era or family line, pull the fifty photos that matter most (the oldest, the faces no one else has, the ones that would hurt most to lose), and start there. Fifty done beats five hundred planned.

• Phone scanning is genuinely good now. A free scanning app (or your camera, held square-on in bright, indirect daylight near a window) captures a print beautifully. Turn the flash off; kill reflections by angling slightly, never by using flash.
• A flatbed scanner is worth borrowing for the precious fifty. Scan prints at 600 dpi, save the master as TIFF or maximum-quality JPEG, and never crop or "enhance" the master — make copies to edit, keep the master untouched.
• Scan the back too whenever anything is written there. The handwriting is part of the inheritance.

Name files so they stay findable

An unnamed scan is a photo lost a second time. Use one pattern and keep it: year-family-people-place — for example, 1962-jackson-rosa-mae-and-samuel-baltimore.jpg. Unknown year? Estimate with a c: c1950-jackson-unknown-woman-porch.jpg. "Unknown" in a filename is honest — and it is exactly the kind of mystery an elder can solve, which is why this guide and the interview guide belong to the same weekend: bring the mystery photos to the sitting.

Write the names down — now

The cruelest loss in family photography is the face everyone recognized and no one labeled. For originals, write lightly on the back with pencil (never ballpoint, which embosses and bleeds): names, place, date. For scans, put the same facts in the filename or a simple list. If you do only one thing from this whole guide, do this — a photo with names is an heirloom; without them it becomes a stranger in a drawer within two generations.

The 3-2-1 rule

Archivists protect irreplaceable things with three copies, on two different kinds of storage, one of them away from the house:

1. Three copies — the original prints, the scans on your computer or phone, and one more copy of the scans.
2. Two kinds of storage — not two folders on the same laptop. A computer plus a cloud drive, or a computer plus a USB drive.
3. One copy off-site — a cloud account, or a USB drive that lives at your sister's house. The fire that takes the shoebox must not be able to take the scans in the same night.

Then share a set with the family. Every cousin holding the scans is another site in your family's archive — and the surest way the faces survive.