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The Family Photo Album: How's Yours?

Traditionally, the album has been the most popular way of organising and sorting personal collections of photographs and other memorabilia. Very often older family album collections which are passed down through several generations end up the worse for wear. They will have been subjected to inappropriate and excessive handling, accidental water stains, mould, insect damage, general dirt and dust. Even the type of album may be endangering the life of the photos in it.

If you have a collection of photos that you are planning to assemble in an album as part of your family history, here are some tips for good assembly and storage ensuring the album will be around for many years.

  • Try to handle prints and negatives along the edges, with clean hands.
  • Do not use paper clips, rubber bands, sticky tape, glues or rubber cement on your photographs.
  • Try not to write on photographs; rather, put information on the enclosure or album page. Felt-tip pens and ball point pens should not be used because they may 'bleed' through and stain. If you have to write on a photo, use a soft (2B) pencil or a 'writes on anything' pencil (e.g. Chinagraph or All-Stabilo pencil) and pressing lightly, write on the back along the edge.
  • Don't use albums with 'magnetic' pages (i.e. pages coated with a sticky adhesive with a removable plastic cover sheet). Over time the adhesive goes yellow and hardens, so the photo can't be taken out. The plastic cover sheet is also damaging, because it is made of a poor quality plastic (PVC or vinyl). As the plastic gets old it can stick to the front of the photo and also affect the colour of the photo.
  • Good quality plastic enclosures are one of the best ways to keep photos in an album. The bound albums with pages of several slip-in sleeves are very good. Try to find out the type of plastic the sleeves are made of - it should only be polyethylene, polyester or polypropylene - again avoid PVC.
  • Another acceptable method is to use good quality plastic sleeves in a ring-binder. There are commercially available A4-size sleeves, made of polypropylene or polyethylene, divided into 2 or 4 sections to accommodate most photo sizes (Bantex Photopockets are a good example). Try to use a binder not covered in vinyl.
  • Bound albums with archival or good quality paper or card pages are also suitable. Photos are best held on the page with clear plastic or paper corners. If you must glue the photos in, use an opaque, white glue stick (e.g. UHU brand) to apply spots of adhesive on the back corners.

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