Archiving your Photos and Heirloom Albums

I am so excited to chat about archiving your photos. I spent a good hour going through hundreds of photos with my mom this past weekend. We were reminiscing on the those exact moments in time. Remembering where we were, special memories with people in the photos, down to what we were wearing and why. It got me thinking about how we preserve those memories and so the idea for this post came alive.

My mom kept saying, I need to restore these images and I need to preserve them better. There sat thousands of prints in boxes. Some even had the original negatives stored with them. As humans, we love memories. And as photographers, we love capturing them. So yes, preservation is important. If you want to be able to look through these precious images ten, twenty, thirty years later — then treat them like gold.

We provide an online gallery, USB flash drives, and prints for our clients. Because for this very reason, it is about preserving those memories. In a digital age, it is easy to keep those images on your phones and computers. Technology has made it even easier to “save” them by backing up to digital cloud services. But if those memories are so important, then why only keep them in one place? Save yourself the heartache of losing all those images. Here are a few tips to archiving your photos:

1. Once you have downloaded your images from your photographer to your devices, make sure that you also back them up to a cloud server. We recommend Google Photos or iCloud.
2. As an added protection, we love storing our images on multiple external hard drives and even a USB Flash Drive for safe keeping. And you can even go the extra mile by keeping those hard copies in a fireproof safe.
3. Lastly, print your photos. You don’t need to print them all but it’s nice to have a tangible copy to flip through. Our favorite consumer lab is mPix. We also love curating our favorites and creating photo albums through Artifact Uprising and Blurb Books. They are the perfect coffee table books and conversation starters. It’s also a really beautiful way to consolidate a ton of photos into one book.

Contax 645 • Kodak Portra 400 

Photographer: Renee Hollingshead

Film Lab: The Find Lab & The Archetype Process