I hate photo albums! There. I’ve said it.
Photo albums ruin photos and prevent one from being able to scan the photos. If you have any photo prints, for the benefit of your descendents, please don’t put them in damned photo albums of any kind! If they’re in them at the moment, remove them this instant!
The ones with adhesive are the worst, but the small flip-book ones are almost as bad. Photo envelopes are just fine – and they take up much less room.
Oh, and for feck’s sake write lightly in pencil on the back of each one who’s in the photo and when they were taken or your future generations won’t have a clue.
I’ve been scanning photos and slides for weeks. Trust me – your descendents will thank you.
If you have any photo prints of your own and don’t have any digital versions of them, scan them in yourself at the highest lossless resolution you can and keep copies of them in that format (ideally without changing colour etc. – photo enhancement techniques and your own skills in using them will probably just improve further as time goes on).
Then, and only then do some image manipulation on them.
Make two copies of the high-resolution and unaltered scans and give two members of your family or friends a copy. Ideally, back them up ‘in the cloud’ too. Personally, I find Picasa does a brilliant job of managing synching photos with Google’s storage at a cost of $5 per year for 20GB of space. It also allows you to share photos easily with others.
I’m having to rescan photos I scanned a few years ago, because I didn’t heed this advice and I now know how to get much better results myself through image manipulation tools, but didn’t keep the original scans -cue expletive!
And right now, I can’t begin to tell you how much more difficult photo albums are making my life… again!