We’re at a point in history and culture when normal social discourse means conversations may include topics like minimalism, decluttering, and made-up concepts like ‘stuffocation’ and ‘stuffidemics.’ And while we might think about going room by room through the bulkier tangible things we keep to declutter our lives, you know what else threatens to bury us? Photographs.

Historically, photographs were the domain of professionals who we posed for and who captured beautiful artistic photographs. We didn’t have a lot of them. It was a lot more expensive, so each one tended to mean more to us.

Now we’ve gone from photos being treasured moments and memories to a proliferation that started back in the 50s and 60s and vastly accelerated with 35mm film—remember all those double and triple prints you’d get so you could distribute them to all your friends and create albums that are now decaying? Maybe you don’t remember who is even in them and half are blurry or badly composed anyway.

And now DIGITAL photos! We take an estimated 5.3 billion photos daily worldwide. Think about that! This is where we’ve done ourselves a disservice because we’ve lost the story thread – why any one of those photos matter. Regular folks like us don’t want to sift through “metadata” on a photo to understand why it matters to us, when we took it, where we were. This is not a pleasant experience.

And the ease of digital also undermines us as we declutter and organize our homes, where if you follow the advice of old, “Take a photo, and let the stuff go,” now that means that photo is very quickly 20 back, 140 back, 1,000 back on your phone. You’ve totally forgotten you took the photo and never shared the story or done anything to remember why it mattered to you.

You may also be interested in A Virtual Impossibility: Keeping Up with All My Digital Photos.

Artifcts and Curating Your Photo Collection

Today when we tell people to clean up and curate their photo collections to something meaningful, we have a truly daunting and growing task in front of us. Even for those photos from the 60s and 70s this is a problem.

While many people won’t have a lot of photos from that time, the photos they do have are very likely housed in shoe boxes, photo albums, or scrapbooks. One day, when our co-founder Ellen Goodwin was working through one of her parents’ scrapbooks, “Because it’s falling apart and needed to be digitized,” she paused to take a picture of a black and white photo of her mother playing tennis. “I took the photo because my immediate thought was, ‘My mother does NOT play tennis.’ It might as well be a Halloween costume.” Ellen’s daughter caught her taking the picture and was confused, “Why are you taking a picture of that? Who is it?”

So here we go – one generation removed, and the story is gone; a second generation removed, and it’s become someone’s genealogy project or fodder for an AI-powered facial recognition tool. Who is that in the photo?

Your Three-Step Photo Curation-to-Story Formula

We know we can do better than to store our photos and cross our fingers that they stay safe and stay relevant. We can curate our photos, the best of, seminal moments, works of art. We can marry those photos with their stories through Artifcts, because a picture is NOT always worth 1,000 words. 

Ellen often shares an example of this based on a subset of photos of her daughter. “I literally have more than 1,000 photos of my kid swimming. She’s been at it for more than half of her lifetime, on three different club teams and now a high school swim team, too. But there’s that ONE picture where she’s flexing her arms and smiling up at me in the stands because she just got her first USA Swimming BB time.”

It’s one of the favorite photos she’s Artifcted. It includes a video of the swim from that day and the story. Ellen acknowledges, “My daughter being 14 years old may not appreciate it now, or even in another 14 years, but she will someday, and it will be here in Artifcts, easy to share, and in a bite sized story format that is within our ever-shrinking attention spans.”

Use this formula to simplify your photo-to-story process so you, too, can make progress on capturing what matters most – the stories behind those photos.

1 - CURATION. You guessed it, start with curation. We live in a bite-sized world with bite-sized attention spans. This is reinforced by research, too. Miller’s Law says that that short-term memory is limited to seven items, plus or minus two. Hedge your bets and go with five items, like the five photos and/or videos you can include in a single Artifct to tell a story.

Besides, achievable goals support habit formation. If you want to make progress in culling through those digital photos, do not try to boil the ocean. Pick a few, Artifct them with a story, and call it a day. Don’t take on an entire memoir at once!

2 - CONTEXT. To avoid getting twisted in knots over what to say about a photo, simply start with something true, e.g. who took the picture?

If you move on through the five Ws like they taught you in grade school, one W, one memory, will unlock others. For example, true story of asking a mom about a wooden cat that’s a piece of decoration:

Mom: “Oh, well, that’s a cat.”  

Daughter: “Thanks, Mom, I can see that. Where did it come from?”  

Mom: “I carved it. I was 16, and it was part of a wood shop class I took.”  

Daughter: “Wood shop in the 60s? For GIRLS?!”  

Mom: “Yes. And actually it was the first year the boys’ and girls’ schools were combined. There was a boy who was jealous of my cat and stole it. It took a while to get it back.” 

And on and on it goes! 

3 - SHARING. Myths, legends, fireside tales, they live on in the sharing. And sharing a story is not the same as telling a story. Telling is unidirectional. Were they really listening, were they ready to hear it, and will they then take on its meaning and value?

You may also be interested in Storytellers, Beware!

Curating Your Photos Often Delivers Unexpected Insights

Now, don’t get us wrong, just because we do not want to look at metadata on a photo to try and remember why it matters or to share the story behind it, does not mean that we think metadata is useless. Quite the opposite. Your own phone can instantly sort and search your collection.

And through sorting your photos quickly, you can then more easily move on to curation. And that’s where the insights begin to flow. We asked Ellen for three things she learned about herself when she paused to sort and curate her digital photos. Here’s what she said:

Swimming is life. Well, this one was not a surprise exactly, I knew I had a lot of swimming photos. But I was surprised I didn’t have more. I discovered an extreme dropoff in volume once Artifcts existed because my habits changed. While sitting and waiting at swim meets, I almost always (a) cull swim photos I don’t want and (b) create relevant Artifcts.

My feet have been places. I had to laugh at myself when I realized just how many photos I have taken of my own feet, wearing shoes, standing in some place I thought was interesting. Thankfully, with metadata, I know where some of those places were when I cannot otherwise remember or figure it out from the picture. And it makes for a great series to share with friends for a laugh.

Inspiration is everywhere; I want to be inspired. More than any other theme I can discern from the pictures I take is the magic of finding inspiration in just about anything. Do you pause to take pics of interesting patterns and shapes in nature? What about beautiful color combinations in a random mural on the street? Lines in a book, art on a cover of a magazine, a setting in a TV show?

Inspiration can come from anywhere, and it’s amazing that digital photography makes it possible to keep it all close at hand.

For an extra boost in your photo-to-story efforts, download our free checklist for photos here.

Happy Artifcting!

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Need help wrangling massive volumes of photos, digital and analog?

Consider hiring a professional photo manager! Check out The Photo Managers to learn more.

© 2025 Artifcts, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Hello April, and hello to our fourth installment of Around the House, With Artifcts. This month’s focus? Our walls, and all the ‘stuff,’ photos, mementos, art, and more that make their way into our hearts and eventually onto our walls.  

So Many Frames! 

There is no precise figure on how much Americans spend annually to frame their photos and mementos, but the global picture framing market was valued at $9.3 Billion in 2022 and is expected to reach $14.67 Billion by 2031, according to the team at Straits Research. Entire companies, such as Framebridge, Frameology, and Keepsake Frames exist with a singular purpose: to frame your ‘stuff,’ from photos to kid-art to travel mementos. They are hoping to cash in on the custom framing market, once dominated by established brick and mortar chains such as Michaels.  

Adding to the myriad of choices you can now make as to what you’ll frame is the complexity of framing itself. You have dozens of choices and endless combinations including types of wood, mattes, and glass. Do you know the difference between museum glass and conservation glass? It gave our co-founders pause! Conservation glass blocks 99% of UV rays, whereas museum glass does that AND provides less than a 1% light reflection. This can dramatically change the view, so to speak, depending on where you intend to hang your piece. 

So many choices. So much money. That said, we’ve yet to encounter a frame that can tell you the story or history of the object under that optimal museum quality glass. Why is THAT photo in a frame? Better yet, who is that in the photo? And what are they doing? What’s the story behind the ticket stub or hotel room key so lovingly matted and preserved for all to see? Oh, and that’s a cool pennant! What’s it doing in a frame?  

Stories and Frames Go Better Together 

Our co-founders LOVE looking at ‘stuff’ in frames (and they love framing ‘stuff’), but they also love the stories, histories, and memories often captured within those four wood-bound sides and UV protective glass. It should come as no surprise that here at Artifcts, we think stories and frames go better together. 

A couple of years ago Ellen was in a home in New Mexico concierge Artifcting with a bachelor in his late 70s who had a collection of really old documents and currency framed in his stairwell. His passion in sharing the history was captivating and they were top of his list to Artifct. “It’s not like I can get my great nieces and nephews to stand still to learn this history.” 

So how do you ensure that the story, history, or memory that prompted you to invest in a frame in the first place lives on for generations to come? Our co-founders share their favorite tips below to help you get started as you tell the stories that live on your walls, one object at a time! 

• Ellen is a fan of finding the favorite moments hanging on her walls and then Artifcting that {photo, textile, you name it!}. If it makes her smile, it’s a prime target for Artifcting. 

One of Ellen's favorite moments on her walls. Click to view the Artifct! 

• Heather has a rule that if it goes into a frame (and on a wall), it must be Artifcted first. Her husband and daughter know the drill, and thanks to the Artifcts, all the stories and memories hanging on their walls (even the ones her daughter is too young to remember on her own!).  
• Don’t let the perfect story trip you up! Sometimes simply stating a fact, like what the item is and how it came into your life, is a great starting point for an Artifct. You can always add details or favorite memories later.
• Add an Artifcts  QR code sticker to connect the physical item with the digital Artifct. Heather’s second rule for anything that goes on her walls is that once it’s Artifcted, it’s stickered, ensuring that if anything happens to her or her husband, their children know what’s what (or in the case of framed photos, who’s who!), and why it mattered to them. Bonus! Fill out the 'In the Future’ field in your Artifct, and your family will have a roadmap for what happens next to all your ‘stuff.’
• Add audio or video to really bring photos, art, and other framed mementos to life! Ellen and Heather are not shy about asking others to record a short audio or video snippet if they gift them a hangable item. Heather’s husband was put on the spot to share his story after gifting her a print from a trip to Chile. That's love! 

Photos + audio = Artifct magic. Click to view the Artifct, read the story, and hear WHY this print made the trip home from Chile. 

Got a favorite framed future Artifct hanging around your house? (See what we did there?) Take a moment to Artifct That and share with us at editor@artifcts.com for a chance to be featured in an upcoming edition of our curator’s choice series.  

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Looking for more tips to get started? You might enjoy these ARTIcles as well!

How To Artifct Art

How To Artifct That Photo

Memories At Home Checklist

© 2025 Artifcts, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

We want to help each person to transform stuff from a potential burden today and on future generations to the source of immediate connection, history, legacy, and financial security. We cannot do it alone.

The simple reality is that the world of ‘stuff’ is broad and sometimes overwhelming! Artifcts helps you to connect the stories and stuff, enjoy walks together down memory lane, support your wills and insurance coverage, and think through and document what to keep based on those hard tradeoffs between the emotional and financial value (and space!).

In 2024, Artifcts expanded its offerings by creating a new membership and platform feature set for professionals who work in your homes helping you with everything from decluttering and organizing to move management to end of life preparedness. The program is called ARTIPro, and it enables professionals to create Artifcts for and with you, securely. You trust these experts to help you with the physical items, and now they can help you organize the memories, stories, and value too.

Complimenting our ARTIPro program are other companies, organizations, and professionals who can help you preserve, sell, move it all, and more. We've learned about an amazing breadth of services and organizations and want to share a few of them with you.

Meet Our Allies in 'Stuff'

Our allies are resources to help expand your awareness of the possible for you and all your ‘stuff.’ The organizations represented cut across multiple categories:

• • • Digitization & Preservation
    • Organizing, Decluttering, & Moving
    • Valuations & Sales
    • Family History & Documentation
    • Preparedness & End-of-Life
    • Artistic Renditions

We have met with every company directly, reviewed their products, and are confident they can help or, at the very minimum, inspire your first or next steps. We have focused on those with broad national, and many international, footprints and services. Yet we know sometimes going local is what's needed, required, or desired. Learn about the possible in the world of stuff here at Artifcts! Head over to Allies in 'Stuff,' click to read about each company, and download the Allies map to have on hand as a reference.

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© 2025 Artifcts, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

When my daughter first started to read, she loved to sit and page through the Shel Silverstein books of poetry. I’d overhear her chirpy little voice melodically reciting the poems in her bedroom to her audience of stuffed animals. The books are aged but quality hardbound copies, gifts from my parents when I was young and bearing inscriptions such as “Merry Christmas, 1992.”  

As my daughter got a bit older, questions started to bubble up from the poems, like, “Why is there a curly string on that phone?” and “What is that v coming out of the top of that big tv?” 

Technology has changed dramatically since Silverstein penned these poems, opening up new topics of conversation across generations.

Technology change has also greatly complicated something else: Simply finding a photo.

I am in my 40s. I have lived through the transition from 35 mm film to digital cameras supported by memory cards to predominantly using my smartphone to take pictures. I don’t even have a camera purchased within the last decade! I should probably take a hint from Artifcts’ Tech Detox checklist to dispose of a few. But maybe not the first big 35mm I bought when I was leaving to study abroad in Sweden. It’s a bit sentimental to me.

I digress!

Fast forward to last weekend when I wanted to find a series of photos I took when my sister and I visited NYC in 2005 just after Thanksgiving. I turned to my husband and said, “What did we even take photos with in 2005? Did we have cameras on our phones then?” He shrugged and hazarded a guess that we were still in the memory card digital camera era.

I looked for over an hour through portable hard drives and photos in cloud storage to no avail. Making this search more complicated was the fact that for some reason, the dates on the photos in the folder viewer were all identical, like it took on the date that I transferred the photos to the hard drive.

What’s next for my photos?

My photo problem is growing worse by the day. I’m guessing yours is, too. Did you know that on average we take 20 photos a day? That’s 5.9 billion photos every day worldwide.

And that’s not even factoring the boxes, albums, and bins of photos that my parents will someday pass on to my siblings and me. I need to get my act together now before the deluge arrives.

My action plan looks something like this: 

• • • Corral all my photos—physical and digital—into one place and back them all up on a portable hard drive and in the cloud, because I do not want to lose anything.
    • For physical photos with no digital version, decide to (a) buy a scanner and digitize myself, (b) hire a professional photo manager to tackle this and so much more, (c) take the photos into a local shop or a mail away company to digitize, and/or (d) use the Photomyne app to scan the photos rapidly without even removing them from their album pages. Making this effort far easier could be technology like Mylio. It is designed to corral your photos into a single library and to make the next step easier too…
    • Sort my photos, at scale, which to me sounds incredibly daunting and unpleasant. This is where I hope that the metadata in at least the digital-native photos will expedite the process because it can reveal time, date, and place. Plus, even the tech built into the modern smartphone can sort by type of photo (yes, it knows how many selfies you’re taking) and provides facial recognition, too.

• • • For scanned photos, well, that’s another matter. There’s no metadata unless I presorted them and have at least an event name or year associated with them or the camera-imposed dates on them (but then, was my camera date and time accurate?).
    • Tag favorite pics that I want to write about, share with others, or otherwise bring back to life, maybe hang on a wall. You know, the joyful part of photos. Even last weekend while hunting for those NYC photos, I came across a beautiful photo of my friend’s mother who has since passed. I paused to text her the photo so I would not forget and so she’d have this sweet image to add to her own collection.

What about my NYC photos?

Hopeless.

For now, I have given up looking for the original, digital versions of my NYC photos. I pulled down the heavy cardboard box from the office closet, opened up the decaying photo album I knew contained print copies of the photos I was seeking, and took photos of the photos.

The entire inspiration for looking for this set of NYC photos was a pin that my daughter noticed on my sweater on a recent cold day here in Austin, Texas. She asked if it was new, and the answer to that question led me back in time to one of my favorite stories to tell people about a Thanksgiving nearly 20 years ago that throws me into fits of laughter even in the telling of it today.

Now, I can be sure my sister will never live down this memorable Thanksgiving and my daughter will know the story of the pin, a future heirloom. My story is Artifcted to stay.

Maybe you have a similar favorite story you tell about a family member to Artifct and share. Some stories are too good to allow them and the photos that add color to the telling to fade away!

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We love writing about photos and helping you capture the meaning behind them. Explore these ARTIcles for more!

© 2025 Artifcts, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Reading time: 5 minutes 

Dusty albums. Bulky albums. What do we do with you? We want to lighten our loads and declutter without guilt. 

Who among us compiles physical photo albums anymore? "Back in the day” a store like Target would have had a huge photo department. You could purchase and process film and buy photo frames and albums, along with supplemental inserts in a dizzying array of designs and sizes. 

No, not so anymore.

As we’ve shifted to digital photos, we’ve likewise replaced physical albums with digital-friendly options, including build-your-own photo books, shared digital albums on social media and cloud storage sites, and digital photo frames, like the beautiful frames from Aura. Physical photo albums today are usually reserved for major milestone events, like weddings, trips, and anniversaries, when we feel it’s worthwhile to sit down and thoughtfully curate those experiences.  

Those of us with photo albums tucked in our closets and bookshelves, those that we have created and inherited, not to mention the albums our parents and grandparents own and we’ll inherit one day, need solutions. What do we do with all the existing albums, so they avoid landing in a craft shop or, worse, a dumpster when the details about the people and stories within are lost to time? 

Photo Albums Have Problematic Similarities to Scrapbooks 

Like scrapbooks, photo albums are designed to be shared, in person, and talked through, reminiscing about and reliving with the telling the places you’ve been, the experiences you have had, and more. Unfortunately, also like scrapbooks, photo albums present long-term challenges: 

1. 1. 1. Do you know the stories behind the photos? (We have tips for that!) Will you remember them? Scrapbooks tend to at least provide more leeway to add notes and stories than photo albums. Stories behind the photos are incredibly vulnerable to being forgotten. We can animate photos in interesting verging on creepy ways, but they cannot remember for us the stories lost. Look back through your albums. Do you recall all the people and events in a way that’s meaningful anymore? 
      2. Albums, the pages within, and the photos will deteriorate. Little known fact outside the photo industry: Those photo prints you ordered in single and even triplicate were never meant to last more than a dozen years, and that's for the highest quality pritns! That’s why the colors change as the chemicals used to create the images degrade and the paper eventually becomes more fragile, too. 
      3. Your album is singular and unique, unless you have access to the negatives. But even then, those are decaying with every passing day as well, so ... 
      4. Albums can be bulky. Do you have room to continue to store them? What about those you may inherit? They are substantial in size and often uncooperative with short shelves and shallow storage. In the words of one Arti Community member, "I’m in my 40s and my albums are still at my parents’ house. I didn't feel the need to take them with me, but, yes, someday I’ll hold onto them. I don’t want to throw them away."

How Can You Preserve Photo Albums?  

And maybe even let some photo albums go ... 

Share the love. At the risk of making a lot of people very angry, we have to say it: You are not beholden to anyone to hold onto your own albums or anyone else's albums. Ask! Do YOU want them? 

Don’t fall for the guilt trip you are getting or think you’ll get. Ideally, you should consider yourself a steward of the history within those albums and as such, ask family members if they want the albums before you take them apart or get rid of them. It’s the kind thing to do. But beyond that, ...

... Digitization has never been easier or more affordable. We have shared tips about digitization in general. You can buy machines to do it yourself, but there’s a catch. We turned to Cathi Nelson, founder and CEO of The Photo Managers, to explain: 

"Many people created scrapbook photo albums during the decades of scrapbooking and those albums are often 12x12, which is too big for traditional flatbed scanners. You can outsource this project to a professional photo manager whose scans allow them to capture the entire page and individual photos.  

If that is not in your budget, and you have a flatbed scanner, such as the Epson v600, scan each page and use photo stitching software to magically merge the pages.  

Another option is to carefullly remove the photos and scan them (front and back). If they are stuck to the pages, you can use a butter knife or dental floss to gently remove the photos."

We want to also celebrate the amazing ease with which apps from modern photo companies like Photomyne can slice up each photo on the page into its own file photo or image file. No need to take the pages apart or tediously scan them one by one. This is great for do-it-yourselfers! You can also link a front and back of a photo together into a single experience, so you can digitally flip the photo over to read the back.

Digitization Wisdom

Before you and as you digitize, keep three things in mind:  

• Photo layouts may be a part of the story. Some albums may be chronological or thematic. Others are designed for people to arrange photos in a way that may inherently help them to share stories, too. Take this example:

Had I scanned each photo and then disassembled the photo album, I would have disconnected these photos from the story of that day as captured in the Artifct, zapping their collective ability to convey a piece of my childhood. Instead, I could photograph or video the album before dismantling, if that’s what I decide to do with the album.

• Capture ALL the details. You scanned the fronts to get the job done quickly, but did you even look at the backs? Now that you have, how will you preserve the additional details on the back with the photo? In a good-better-best plan, this could be: 

• • • Create an index as you go for your photos with the file name and other details you care about (location, people, event, ...) or edit the photo metadata (e.g. date, location, and other information stored with the image file) with the additional information; 
    • Transform the album into a photo book and add the information in the image captions;  
    • Artifct the photos and include what you know about them. Check out our interrogation techniques for photos.

• Share the stories behind the photos. CONNECT with your loved ones. Don’t be annoying and share 100s of photos from a single trip. Tell them the “best of” or most meaningful moments. Artifct the best ones! Artifcts are easy to share, helping you get the story out there so it can live on. You might also share the Artifct with a friend who is going on a trip to the same place you went and want your tips! You can also easily share an Artifct to a friend’s or family member’s digital photo frame. Ask them how.  

If you are taking the time to create photo albums, maybe take time to create an additional Artifct or two to go with each album, even if the Artifct is of the album itself, and is your story of why you created it, what it means to you, etc. Bonus, you can include audio and video and bring your photo album to life for the next generation.

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Other ARTIcles by Artifcts you may enjoy: 

Photos + Stories Go Better Together: A Conversation with Cathi Nelson, CEO of The Photo Managers

Storytellers, Beware!

Rescue Mission: That’s More Than a Photo

© 2024 Artifcts, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The following article includes excerpts from a true story shared with Artifcts by a member of the Arti Community and republished here with permission. May their loss help your future. 

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A Careless Accident at a Storage Facility 

Imagine yourself in this scenario: Wildfires are approaching your home. You evacuate, taking with you your most cherished possessions, including those incredibly vulnerable photos, videos, books, and family documents. You feel relief when you place them inside a climate-controlled storage unit far outside the fire zone. 

Days later you receive a call from the storage facility. There’s been an accident. Your storage unit has been flooded via a damaged sprinkler system in the unit above your own. “Please come to our facility to review and document the damage for insurance purposes.” 

Your heart sinks to the floor. The expression, “Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” comes to mind. 

When you arrive, and you are taking in the large-scale and surely emotionally charged loss, look once, then twice, before springing to action on areas of most obvious damage.

Salvaging Water Damaged Photos and Negatives

When mother nature, home mishap, or some other event occurs that threatens to rob you of your cherished memories incapsulated in your photos, there’s no room for “should haves.” We all know about fireproof boxes, digitization options, and more. But in life we are busy, and we have finite resources, too. We made the best choices we could at the time. Now is the time for action to salvage what can be salvaged.

• Act smart, act fast

The most intriguing piece of advice you’ll hear when water has claimed your photos? Freeze them. That’s right, stick them in plastic bags and freeze them. Okay, first interlay sheets of wax paper and place them in a giant plastic freezer bag, but yes, then freeze them. That bit of advice alone should shock you into a feeling of hope. Store that tidbit away for the day you need it.  

Your top goals are to prevent further damage and to bring back under your control at least some of the variables now, and frankly, for the remaining life of these items. Mold is an equally deadly culprit where the life of your photos are concerned. 

Talking us through the "I froze them, now what?” frontier, we reached out to professional photo manager Kristen Goodman, of Clicking with Kristen. Based out of Naples, Florida, Kristen is still helping families caught in the crosshairs of Hurricane Ian (2022) and has deep experience in helping salvage precious photos.

• Embrace Kristen’s “Dont’s” 

You’re poised for action, which is great, but keep these guidelines in mind so we can skip the regret that you may otherwise feel later: 

• • • Don’t panic and throw away your wet, muddy, or damaged photos or albums. 
    • Don’t dry photos in a place with bright sunlight, wind, or dust. 
    • Don’t pry wet or dry photos apart. 
    • Don’t use heat sources (hairdryer, microwave) to dry photos. 
    • Don't forget gloves and a mask when handling wet photos and albums. 
    • Don’t delay! After about 48 hours mold will begin to grow.

• Now, Onto the “Nexts” in the Mess

Be discriminating. Which photos do you want to spend time and money to preserve and potentially restore? For example, if you have very old heritage photos, the ONLY photo of {name of loved one}, you may want to prioritize these photos for consultation with a professional photo restoration service. 

Separating, soaking, and freezing photos. We warned you not to pry photos apart, and that advice holds. But if they are apart, remove any plastic covers and sleeves from the photos, if possible. And then layer wax paper between individual photos or album pages to freeze. 

If you’re thinking, “But I have a brick of stacked dried photos,” there’s still hope. You can soak them in clean water and then gently peel them apart, then proceed with drying them out, but when in doubt, talk with a local pro! 

Once your pictures have frozen, you’ll thaw them out in batches to begin drying. 

The photos’ futures. For those in acceptable condition (to you!), digitize them and toss the originals. They are very vulnerable to mold, it’s a sad truth. For the others, if they are important enough to you for any reason, take them to a professional for restoration, repair, and digitization.

• Go get professional help!

Amazing resources abound for you to learn more and to connect with professionals locally to help you. Here are just a few resources Kristen recommends: 

• • • B&H offers ongoing educational webinars and resources. You might start with this video, Protect Your Photos from Extreme Weather. 
    • Kathy Stone’s blog, including Preparing to Evacuate Ahead of Floods or Severe Storms as well as What to Do When Disaster Strikes Your Photos
    • The Photo Managers, to find someone local to help! 
    • And one more for good measure from Artifcts, the Society of American Archivists, through which you can find archival specialists for photos and beyond!

How Did the Storage Story End?

If you're like us and dislike a cliffhanger, here’s how the storage disaster we started this article with turned out:

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© 2024 Artifcts, Inc. All Rights Reserved.