Our house is mentally busy and time is valuable. I wanted to bring together some practical tips for other people who are flat out, but want to remember special moments and people.

I’ve always liked to take lots of pictures and I’ve filled shelves with albums and hard drives with digital photos and video. Insurance is great for replacing your assets if your house burns down, but what about your priceless photos? Be honest, do you really back up your computer hard drive regularly? I’ll steer clear of the traditional/digital debate because like a lot of people, I take advantage of both and it really comes down to what you hope to do with the images.

taking care of your traditional photos
Photos meet all kinds of grisly ends in flooded garages, burned houses and at the merciless hands of toddlers. In putting this together, I saw all sorts of advice that would be realistic with the resources of a museum, but impractical for a kiwi family. If you want to enjoy your photos for a long time to come, the upshot is that you’ll need to take care of them and pass photos on in the best possible condition. Here are some helpful tips;

1. take care of film: Like deodorant, good words for film are `cool’ and `dry’. If the film is not in the camera yet, or has just been taken out to await developing, keep it in the plastic canister it came in and put it in a cool dry place (not your armpit). Film does expire, so check that you can get it through your camera within the 12 month expiry term. Old film loses sensitivity and will give pale, washed out pictures. Film left in cameras for more than 3 months runs the risk of drying out - another reason to buy 24 shot rather than 36 shot films…

2. display them: What good is a photo that can’t be seen? That said, handle them with clean hands and get them into an album as soon as you can. Don’t let it be one of those rainy day jobs that you never get around to doing. Framed photos on your wall should be copies of your favourite images placed out of direct sunlight, the original stored properly elsewhere. If you need a photo to last a lot longer, you can get special archival prints made.

3. get digital copies: The bad news is that your photos begin fading from the moment you take them and colour generally fades faster than black and white. Digital images have their own issues but they don’t fade, so always get a high-resolution CD made when you get your photos developed. You could scan them yourself but put a value on your time!

4. label them: Photos are supposed to add to your memory but you’ll still need to know a little bit about the picture for it to be of much use in 50-100 years time. At the very least you need to record the date, location and names of people photographed. Why should your grandchildren have to discover it all over again? Write lightly with a soft lead pencil (graded F, B or B2) on the back of the photo, ink chemicals can wreck photos.

5. albums: With photos, any form of protection is better than none. For most people this means decent acid-free photo albums with uncoated plastic sleeves. Avoid the sticky albums with the cover sheet as the sticky chemicals will wreck your photos. If you’re more serious about preservation, then photos are stored between acid-free card in airtight boxes or bags. If you’re really serious, you’ll need to read books on the subject.

6. storage: Keep your photos in cooler, dryer rooms with good ventilation and away from young children. Don’t keep them in sunlight, above the fire or near the hot water cylinder and avoid storing them in the roof or under the house where temperatures change a lot. Avoid the humidity of bathrooms and the condensation from the outside walls of your house. The hallway is often ideal, especially if you have to leave your house in a hurry with your photos!

7. negatives: Keep your film-based negatives away from your photos, so if your albums get destroyed you can still access the images. The negatives can also give off chemicals that can harm your photos as they age.

8. disaster plan: Photos are only replaceable if you’ve taken steps to protect them. For future photos, get digital copies on CD during processing and observe the digital tips, for existing photos, consider scanning them into your computer over time. There are other fallbacks, such as placing all of your negatives somewhere safe (maybe another family member’s house), or always getting doubles made and giving them to family. Best of all, avoid loss by storing them near the door to maximise your chances of getting them out safely.

taking care of your digital photos
Digital photos can be easily copied and don’t fade, but data corruption, theft, destruction or deletion can mean the end of your precious photos. Some great pictures are simply lost somewhere within nightmare file structures. It doesn’t help when your pictures are unhelpfully named IMAGE001.jpg etcetera! You can go to great lengths to stop bad stuff from happening to your images, but at the end of the day, you should at least focus on a couple of basic steps and do those well. Here are some thoughts and suggestions, hopefully some of them will seem worthwhile to you.

1. get a big memory card: Assume storage will continue to get larger and cheaper, so take the highest resolution images you can (large file size) as in five years time, you’ll be wondering why you put up with such low-resolution images. The constraint here is typically the storage capacity of your camera, so there’s a good reason to upsize to the largest you can afford. Remember, you can always `downsize’ images for emailing or posting on the web but you can’t add resolution for printing after the fact!

2. download often: Cameras get stolen, damaged, dropped and lost. Cards get corrupted. These should be enough good reasons to get those photos off your camera regularly.

3. cull the herd: The big problem with digital images is that people take heaps of them and the good shots are buried amongst the bad (often outnumbered 10 to 1…). Set your folder view to thumbnails and get busy on the delete key. If you only have good shots, then it’s not such a big job to label and back them up.

4. label your photos: At the very least, you need to record the date, location and names of people photographed. It pays to do this with each image individually as you may use the image (e.g. sending it to a friend) out of the context of the folders you keep the image in. IMAGE001 may mean something within a folder entitled `Grandma’s Birthday’ but on its own, it could be anything.

5. back up your photos: This one is non-negotiable! I recommend you get a full copy of your photos completely off your computer. You can use an external USB hard drive, burn to DVD or CD, or backup to another computer, even the web! If using DVD or CD, it pays to rotate 3 rewriteable discs so you’ll always have a couple of backups. Keep them in a CD case right by the door so you can get them out fast. I also like to keep a copy at my sister’s house and my PO Box. If you’re worried about privacy, you can encrypt the files if you plan to archive to the web or another person’s house.

6. long term issues: Although digital photos don’t degrade like traditional photos, the physical storage of them may. It is hard to know whether digital storage will last the distance. Although there is a risk of marooning your photos on obsolete media, you’ll hopefully recognise this and update the media before this happens.

7. printing digital photos: Print technology has come a long way and the emphasis is on convenience. Interestingly, people still want to have a physical image in their hands, so printer manufacturers are happily marketing new machines and services to you! You may not realise that a lot of these prints are not expected to even last a decade. However, there are archival pigments and papers that are rated to last for centuries but these cost more and you’ll need to look after them as per traditional photos.