Preserve And Share Your Old Photo Albums & Scrapbooks
Do you have piles of old crumbling photo albums or shelves of beautiful, but bulky scrapbooks? Are you wondering what the best way to preserve them and share them with your family? We have a few ideas.
Scanning Photo Albums and Scrapbooks
One of the best ways to preserve your old photo albums or scrapbooks is to have them scanned. In some cases, such as a non-photo-safe album or crumbling pages, we recommend that the photos be taken out of the albums, scanned, and then placed in a new, safer home for the pictures, like a new photo-safe album or an archival storage box .
However, there are other situations when you want to keep the albums intact. Maybe your grandmother has written on every page. Perhaps it’s your own wedding album, and you want it preserved as-is. Maybe your mom spent hours and hours creating a scrapbook with lots of unique papers, embellishments, and beautiful photos. In all of these instances, there is no reason to disassemble anything. Let’s scan it all to preserve it, back it up, and create the opportunity to make copies.
Let me share two projects I have worked on that are the perfect scenarios for scanning and recreating into new beautiful photo books.
A Wedding Album Recreated
A very dear family friend asked me to scan her wedding album because she and her husband were getting ready to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. She wanted to be sure her photos were preserved and digitized so she could easily share them on social media.
Unlike wedding albums today, this was a small photo album with the pictures only measuring about 3″x4,” and of course, they had discolored with age. We carefully removed and scanned the photos and then returned them to the original photo album. After some minor color corrections to the digital versions, the images were saved on a USB drive and the album and the USB were returned to my friend. She was thrilled with the result.
What I didn’t tell her is that I was also creating a special surprise as my anniversary gift to them. I recreated their wedding album into a high-quality photo book from AdoramaPix (now Printique ). It features a leather-look cover, much larger versions of the photos, and thicker pages. It was a hit!
Now the original album has been safely preserved, a new and improved version has been created, and, best of all, our friends love both of them!
About a year after this project was completed, the husband of this couple sadly passed away. I recently saw the wife and she told me how precious it was to her that I had done this work for her. This is a true example of “making memories matter.”
Give Big, Bulky Scrapbooks A New Life
I’ve mentioned before on this blog that my family goes to the beach every summer and has done so almost every year since I was 5. It’s a special tradition for us, and over the years we have taken hundreds, probably thousands of photos, from these vacations.
In the early 2000s at the height of the Creative Memories scrapbooking days, my mom took some of these photos and created two large scrapbooks highlighting our times together at the beach starting in the mid-70s. For many years she would bring them to the beach, and we would enjoy reminiscing, laughing, and talking about our beachside vacations. But in time, this stopped because the 12”x12” scrapbooks were just too big and bulky and hard to carry around, at least on vacation.
One year, I decided the scrapbooks needed an update so I borrowed the scrapbooks from my mom, and I scanned every page of those two albums. Then I created a single 12”x12” photo book that is basically an exact duplicate of the two original scrapbooks. Now the two big scrapbooks have been digitized, preserved, and reduced to one much thinner book. And if anyone in my family wants their own copy, all we have to do is order another one.
Scanning Your Photo Albums and Scrapbooks
Whether it’s an album you want to keep intact or a scrapbook you want to preserve for prosperity, there are ways to scan and keep the original as is.
Have you considered scanning your photo albums and scrapbooks? Comment below to tell me which one you’d tackle first.
Want to Know More?
If you want to work with a photo organizer near you to help you organize and preserve your photos, contact us or visit The Photo Managers to find one in your area.