How to store old photographs so they stop fading

The photographs people lose are rarely lost dramatically. There is no flood and no fire. They simply sit in a garage for thirty years and quietly turn orange, or come out of a sticky album with the image left behind on the page.

Storage is unglamorous and it is the highest-leverage thing you will ever do for a family collection. It is also mostly free.

The four things that do the damage

Heat accelerates every chemical reaction inside a photograph, including the dye fading that turns colour prints orange. A rough rule from conservation: each ten degrees Celsius of extra warmth roughly halves the material’s life.

Humidity invites mould, encourages prints to stick to each other and to glass, and makes emulsions soft. Damp is worse than warm.

Light bleaches dyes, and ultraviolet does it fastest. A photograph framed on a sunny wall for twenty years is being slowly erased in plain sight.

Bad materials do damage all on their own. PVC sleeves, sticky album pages, rubber bands, paper clips, sticky tape and ordinary cardboard all attack photographs chemically over years.

Notice that three of those four are decided entirely by which room you choose.

The three worst places in your house

They are, unfortunately, the three places almost everyone uses.

The attic. Enormous temperature swings, brutally hot in summer. The single most destructive room in a typical home for photographs.

The garage. Damp, unheated, wildly variable, and full of vehicle fumes.

The basement. Humidity and flood risk together, which is the worst possible pairing.

To that list add anywhere near a bathroom or kitchen, any external wall that gets cold enough to condense, and the top of a radiator or a boiler cupboard.

Where to put them instead

An interior cupboard or wardrobe on a living floor, against an internal wall. It is not exciting advice. It is also the whole answer, because that space is naturally cool, dark, dry and, crucially, stable.

Stability deserves emphasis. Photographs cope better with a constant slightly warm room than with a cooler room that swings ten degrees every day. Every cycle expands and contracts the layers of the print, and eventually they separate.

Aim loosely for cool room temperature and moderate humidity, roughly 30 to 50 percent. You do not need a hygrometer for a family collection, but if a room ever smells musty, that is your answer and you should move them.

Materials, and what the labels actually mean

The vocabulary is used loosely, so here is what to look for.

“Acid-free” is necessary but not sufficient. Paper can be acid-free and still contain lignin, which breaks down into acids over time. Ask for acid-free and lignin-free, and buffered or unbuffered depending on the material, though for a family collection this distinction is a refinement rather than a requirement.

For plastics, name the plastic. Polyester, polypropylene and polyethylene are all safe and stable. PVC is not, and it is common in cheap sleeves. PVC releases plasticisers that migrate onto image surfaces, stick to them, and eventually destroy them. A useful field test: if a plastic sleeve has a strong smell, do not put a photograph in it.

Boxes beat albums for anything you are not looking at often. A simple archival box with prints stored upright and properly supported is better than most albums, cheaper, and easier to get things out of.

The magnetic album problem

If your photographs are in a self-adhesive album from the 1970s or 1980s, the sort with tacky pages under a clear film, you have a genuine problem. Those pages yellow badly, and the adhesive bonds permanently to the backs of prints. Pulling a photograph off frequently takes the image layer with it.

Digitise before attempting removal. Scan the whole page in the album if you must, at 600 DPI, so that if a print tears on the way out you still have the image. Then remove slowly, and stop if the print resists. Dental floss slid gently underneath sometimes helps. It is unsatisfying advice, but a scan in hand beats a ruined original.

What to do this weekend

You do not need to do everything. In descending order of value:

1. Move the boxes out of the attic, garage or basement into an internal cupboard. Costs nothing, and is by far the biggest single improvement available to you.
2. Take out the rubber bands, paper clips and sticky tape. All three cause damage.
3. Digitise the twenty photographs that matter most. Storage slows decay, it does not stop it. A good scan is the only genuinely permanent copy.
4. Replace any PVC sleeves as budget allows.
5. Take framed photographs off sunny walls, or reprint a copy for display and store the original properly.

The best-preserved photograph in the world is still one house fire from gone. Digitise the ones you love, keep a copy somewhere else, and then store the originals well.

If your prints have already faded, storage will not undo it, but our guides on why old photos turn orange and what DPI to scan at cover what can still be recovered from them.