Photo storage (physical copies)- boxes vs albums

[Hilltopmom]

Can we talk photo storage? I have a lot of photo albums but they are older and starting to fall apart. Plus dusty and take up tons of space. Any better photo storage ways?

Scan and make into hard cover books?

Take them out of the plastic album pages and file them in photo boxes?

They are in regular album pages, not the old sticky ones that ruin the photos.

If you have scanned a bunch ever, how did you do it? 

I don’t want to just store them digitally- I’d like a physical way to look through them.

help! Thanks 

 

[Beth S]

Photo Storage was one of my big projects when our Nest emptied.
I did scan all the photos in my photo albums, then reinserted them back into the photo albums.

I love having them both digitally and physically.

If I didn't have them in photo albums already, I would likely use photo boxes--so much easier to sort.

Here's a blog post about organizing photos. 
Link = How To Organize Photos & Negatives To Preserve Your Memories (home-storage-solutions-101.com)

 

[prairiewindmomma]

Label the backs of the photos, whatever you do—names, place, date, significance if there is any.

Boxes take up the least space. Bound albums are lovely and are a bit thinner, but they still take up a lot of shelf space depending on the number of photos you have. OTOH, albums do allow for journal style storytelling. 
 

Printed bound albums run me about $100 each from Costco when I do our yearly album printing. Archival boxes are $8-10 from Amazon (each). So, price also factors in. 

[Brittany1116]

For photos that are already printed and in albums, I switched to photo boxes. I think it is an Iris box and it has small plastic files in a larger briefcase style box. For newer photos, I am making Shutterfly albums. I am a few years behind in that, but SF stores indefinitely and could even automatically create an album for me if I wished.

[Katy]

I ordered new, matching black leather photo albums with space for captions years ago. A shelf full. I still haven’t finished moving pictures into them. It was an Amazon find.

[Hilltopmom]

And I happen to have an empty one of those plastic storage bins with smaller boxes inside AND one or two of the cardboard ones with the dividers too… so I dont even need to buy anything! Whew.

[LaughingCat]

I'm debating this too -- I feel like albums would be better for looking at but, having just inherited all my parents photos, they were definitely more of a pain to deal with and the vast majority were not albums I would want to keep for myself (they did a lot of traveling after they retired).  AND clearly no one had looked at any of them in many, many years (and there was no time to actually go through them all and make decisions on what to keep while cleaning out the house). 

 OTOH I have almost all my own photos in photo boxes (the shoebox style ones)-- and while they are easy to flip through, I am the only one that (rarely) gets them out.  Also, I put most of my parent's photos in boxes (as a first step in organizing them) and then a couple of them flipped over with photos everywhere -- which has made me realize I need to somehow mark each photo with information as I organize them (thankfully, the boxes that flipped had photos that were not yet organized).  

I also at one point put a bunch of photos in the big plastic box with smaller plastic photo boxes inside -- hoping that would make it more likely that they would be looked at but instead it just added one more step, making the photos even less looked at.  So I recently pulled all those photos out and put them back into the shoebox style box.

My current plan is to (slowly) go through the photos and figure out which are actually keepers -- and then digitize those.   And make the digital folders available to all the relatives who would be interested.   

And then keep the remaining photos in the photo boxes -- but as part of that, to pick out only my very favorites and make albums of those, with notes, comments, stories.   And to hopefully do this over and over through the years -- so that my kids don't inherit masses of random photos, but only ones that I (or they) cared enough about to keep looking at or to do something with.

[Myra]

I just finished putting photos in boxes - with index tabs for years.  

 

Then I made a personal photo album from Creative Memories for each kiddo - birth through age 21 - a year of their life over two adjacent pages - does that make sense?  

[EKS]

21 hours ago, Hilltopmom said:

Scan and make into hard cover books?

I'm currently doing this.  I am only using a subset of the photos, since most of them are not so good.  I'm using the Epson Perfection V600 Photo scanner, which is excellent for this purpose.

I'm keeping the hard copies as well.  At the moment they are in both albums and boxes.  The photos in boxes have held up the best (over 20-30 years).