Index
Every guide, in the order the work happens.
This site is one argument in ten parts: a family photograph collection is an archive, and archives are managed in a sequence. Sort before you scan. Scan before you restore. Store before anything else. Here is the whole thing, in the order the work actually falls.
01
Sort
First: work out what you have.
- Guide 01 — Sorting How to sort a shoebox of family photographs in one evening The three-pass method, what to do with the photographs of people nobody can name, and why sorting before scanning saves you weeks.
- Guide 08 — Dating How to tell when an old photograph was taken Process, mount, edge and colour as evidence — plus a tool that narrows a photograph to a decade range and tells you which clue did the work.
02
Store
Then: stop the damage that is already happening.
- Guide 02 — Preservation How to store old photos so they last another fifty years Temperature, humidity, enclosures, and the specific rooms in a house that destroy photographs. Also: which decades of colour prints are already failing.
- Guide 09 — Rescue How to get a photograph out of a magnetic album Self-adhesive albums from the 1960s to the 1980s are staining the prints inside them. Four methods for freeing a print, in order of preference.
- Guide 10 — Emergency Wet photographs: what to do in the first two days After a flood or a leak, everything depends on the 48-hour mould window. Drying properly, and why freezing is a legitimate answer.
03
Digitise
Then: make a copy that survives you.
- Guide 06 — Digitising Scan them yourself, or pay someone? The arithmetic nobody does, the DPI you actually need by purpose, and why a phone photograph of a print is not a scan — with a calculator that answers it for your collection.
- Guide 11 — Film Slides and negatives: storing, dating and scanning film The carousels and the shoebox: reading mounts and edge printing for a date, cold storage, and the one film that breaks infrared dust removal.
04
Value
Then: decide what is worth the effort.
- Guide 03 — Value Are old family photos worth money? What actually sells, what never does, and the honest answer for the box in your cupboard. Identification, not condition, is where value lives.
- Guide 05 — Inheritance When the photographs arrive with the house The estate situation: dividing a collection between siblings, what to keep, what to let go, and how to do it without a family argument.
05
Restore
06
Tools
Three tools that do the arithmetic for you.
- Tool Restoration triage Five questions about the damage and what you want it for. You get a route: restore automatically, restore professionally, rescan first, or leave it alone.
- Tool Photograph date estimator Four questions about the object — process, back, edges, colour — and the decade range they bracket.
- Tool Scanning cost calculator Your collection size, your hourly rate and the service price. The break-even point, calculated rather than guessed.
07
Reference
Questions
The things people ask next.
Where should I start with a box of old family photographs?
Sort first, in one pass, without trying to identify anyone you cannot identify in ten seconds. The photographs you can name are the ones worth scanning and restoring, and you cannot find them until the box is sorted.
What order should the work happen in?
Sort, then store, then digitise, then restore. Sorting prevents duplicated work, storage prevents further damage, digitising preserves the information in case the physical object is lost, and restoration is only worth doing on a file that came from a proper scan.
Is any of this site's advice influenced by it being run by a restoration company?
The site is published by the team behind Pinin, a restoration service, and says so on every page. Most of the guides are about sorting, storage and scanning, where there is nothing to sell you, and the cost guide spends more words talking you out of paid restoration than into it.
Not sure which of these you need?
Five questions about the damage, the faces and what you want it for — and a route, rather than a sales pitch.