Genealogy is a hobby that compliments many others hobbies. Some genealogists are also avid scrapbookers and create artwork from their research. Some researchers have become writers and have been able to publish family histories. So it is very likely that either by choice or chance many genealogists have become the caretakers of their family’s photograph collections. This has forced many to spend time protecting these collections from deteriorating. One of the worst offenders to photo preservation is the once popular magnetic photo album. These albums use strong adhesive to secure photographs. Over the ears the chemicals in the adhesive eat away at the photographs.
The best course of action is to remove the photographs as soon as possible. Because these pictures are damaged it is best to scan them and create a digital version that can be repaired. Once removed these photographs are often sticky and maybe too damaged to scan. In this case consider taking a high quality picture of the photograph. Removing photographs from magnetic albums can seem like a huge protect. Here is a video from the Smithsonian that details an easy way to remove photographs with dental floss.
How so you sort your pictures, by event, person, family, year, or other? How many magnetic albums can you find in your house?
I had no idea about magnetic photo albums, or about the damage they could do. What a useful video for a genealogy blog. Dental floss is so cool :) This is something I'll have to remember as I get further into my hobby!
ReplyDeleteI currently don't have many photographs, but as I find more time for genealogy I hope to obtain some. I think I would ahve trouble sorting the actual photographs, but might do so by year. I'd love to scan all my photos so I have digital copies, back them up to an external harddrive, then also save them to flickr or another online cloud source. I'd tag them so they have first names, surnames, year, and maybe other keywords. I'd be afraid, though, that if I used too many tags it could get messy.