How do I store photographs, negatives and slides so they last?

Photographic prints, negatives and slides are chemically active objects and they degrade continuously. What you control is the rate. Two things dominate: the environment, where heat and humidity accelerate everything, and the materials in contact with the print, where the wrong plastic or the wrong adhesive does damage that no environment will prevent. The good news is that both fixes are cheap and take one afternoon.

Step by step

1. Get everything out of magnetic and self-adhesive albums.The sticky-page albums with a clear film flap, sold from the 1970s onwards, use an adhesive that yellows, embrittles and eventually bonds permanently to the print. They are the most common cause of ruined family photographs. Remove them now, gently, and never force one that has stuck — a specialist can help with those.
2. Get rid of PVC sleeves and pages.PVC releases plasticisers and acidic breakdown products that stain and soften emulsion. Replace with polypropylene, polyethylene or polyester sleeves, all of which are inert. If it smells of vinyl or feels slightly tacky, it is PVC.
3. Use acid-free, lignin-free boxes and interleaving.Ordinary cardboard is acidic and yellows what is in it. Archival board boxes and unbuffered acid-free tissue are inexpensive and are the correct answer for anything you intend to keep for decades.
4. Store them in the house, in a cool, dry, dark, stable place.Not the loft, not the garage, not a basement, not an outside wall cupboard. A wardrobe shelf or the bottom of an internal cupboard is far better than any of those. Stability matters more than any specific temperature.
5. Handle prints by the edges, with clean dry hands.Skin oils leave permanent fingerprints on emulsion, particularly on gloss surfaces. Cotton gloves are the traditional advice; clean dry hands and edge handling is sufficient for family photographs.
6. Store negatives and slides separately from prints.The negative is the original and the print is a copy. Keeping them in different places means a single leak, fire or theft cannot take both. Negatives in inert sleeves, slides in their boxes or archival pages, both flat and dark.
7. Label with a soft pencil on the back border, or on the sleeve.Never a ballpoint, which indents through, and never a solvent marker, which bleeds through over time. Better still, write on the enclosure rather than the print.
8. Scan the irreplaceable ones at a useful resolution.High enough to reprint at a reasonable size — for a standard print, a few thousand pixels on the long edge. Scan negatives and slides rather than prints where you have them, because there is far more information in the original.
9. Keep the digital copies in more than one place.A copy on a computer is not a backup. One copy on the machine, one on an external drive, one off-site or in cloud storage. Photographs are the household data people most regret losing and the most commonly lost.
10. Do not laminate anything.Lamination is irreversible, traps moisture and heat-damages the emulsion. It has been the end of a great many irreplaceable documents and photographs.

Common mistakes

• Keeping photographs in the loft — Heat cycling and humidity swings accelerate every degradation mechanism at once, and it is where most family photographic loss actually occurs.
• Leaving prints in magnetic albums because removal looks risky — The adhesive continues to cure and the removal only gets harder. Doing it this year is materially easier than doing it in ten.
• Writing on the back with a ballpoint — It indents through to the image side and the ink can eventually bleed. Soft pencil in the border, or write on the sleeve.
• Scanning at low resolution to save space — Storage is cheap and rescanning means handling fragile originals again. Scan once, properly.
• Storing prints and negatives together — One incident takes both. Separating them is free and it is the only real redundancy a physical archive has.

Questions people ask