How to store old photos so they outlive you.

Four things are doing almost all of the damage.

The pattern to notice: three of the four are about the environment, and only one is about what you buy. Moving the box out of the loft does more than any product on the market.

What “archival” is actually claiming.

The word is unregulated in retail. Anyone can print it on a box. What it is supposed to mean is specific, and worth checking on the label:

• Lignin-free. Lignin is in wood pulp and breaks down into acids that attack paper. Look for "lignin-free" or "acid-free", not just "archival".
• pH neutral to slightly alkaline — roughly 7.0 to 8.5 for enclosures.
• PAT passed. The Photographic Activity Test is the actual standard for whether a material is safe in contact with a photograph. It is the only claim that means anything on a sleeve.
• No PVC, no acetate. Polyester (Melinex/Mylar), polyethylene and polypropylene are fine. Polyvinyl chloride is not, and it is what most cheap "photo protector" sleeves are made of.
• Unbuffered for some colour and cyanotype materials, buffered for most black-and-white. If you are storing a mixed collection, unbuffered is the safer default.

Practical shortcut: buy from a supplier that states PAT and the polymer by name. If a listing cannot tell you which plastic it is, it is PVC.

Cool, dark, dry, and steady.

1. Move the collection into living space. A cupboard in a hallway beats an archive-quality box in an attic, every time. This is free and it is 80% of the benefit.
2. Store upright, like books. Flat stacking puts weight on the prints at the bottom and presses dust and grit into the ones below. If a print must lie flat, keep it in its own enclosure.
3. Individually enclose anything that matters. One print per sleeve. Sleeves that hold four photographs mean four surfaces touching each other.
4. Use a proper box. Acid-free, lignin-free, with a lid. Not a shoebox, not a plastic storage tub with a gasket (traps moisture), not a wooden chest (wood acids).
5. Keep a silica gel sachet in humid climates and re-dry it periodically. In a dry climate, skip it — you are solving a problem you do not have.
6. Check damage twice a year. Mould spreads, and insects eat gelatine. Ten minutes with the box open, in daylight, is enough.

The fridge and the freezer are not storage for prints you care about. Moisture cycling and condensation do more damage than the temperature saves, and a print that comes out cold into a humid room will attract water directly onto the emulsion.

The 1970s “magnetic” album is the most damaging object in the house.

Those self-adhesive albums — a sticky page under a clear plastic sheet — were sold by the million in the 1970s and 1980s and were marketed as a way to protect photographs. They do the opposite. The adhesive is not permanent but it does not stay put either: it yellows, it off-gasses into the print, and it stains in a characteristic brown tide-mark that creeps in from the edges. The plastic overlay is usually PVC, which is the material that should never touch a photograph.

Worse, the prints bond to the page. After forty years many are welded down, and the adhesive has often attacked the emulsion side — meaning that pulling one off takes the image with it.

What to do, in order:

1. Scan the album pages before you attempt anything. Even a mediocre capture of a page is infinitely better than destroying a print that had no other copy. This is the single most important instruction on this page.
2. Do not force a print that resists. If it will not lift with gentle, even pressure from a corner, it is bonded. Stop.
3. Try a warm, dry release — a hairdryer on the lowest setting, held well away, warming the back of the page, can soften some adhesives. Never wet, never solvent, never heat the print directly.
4. For anything valuable, get advice before acting. A conservator will often release an album safely for a modest fee. The failure mode here is permanent.
5. Whatever comes out goes straight into an unbuffered archival sleeve — the adhesive residue remains reactive, so do not put a freed print back into paper or an album.

A digital copy is a copy, not a backup.

The word "backup" gets used for things that are not backups. A folder of scans on a laptop is a copy. A folder of scans in one cloud account is also a copy, and it disappears the month the card expires or the account is closed for inactivity.

The durable version is unglamorous: three copies, on two kinds of media, with one of them off-site.

• Three copies. The original scan on your computer, an external drive, and somewhere else.
• Two media types. Not two folders on the same failing disk.
• One off-site. Cloud storage, a drive at a relative's house, anything that survives your house.
• Say who inherits it. The most common way a family archive is lost is that nobody knew the password, or that anyone else was meant to have it.

And keep the paper. A digital copy protects the image; it does nothing for the object, and a scan of a photographic print is a second-generation copy. The print is still the original.