When storing heirlooms, make sure that you are putting them in a place not prone to flooding. So avoid the basement and garage at all cost. It is recommended that you store items on the uppermost level of your living areas.

Humidity is not really a factor in Colorado, but is a concern in other places. There are drying packets that can be put in with heirlooms and a dehumidifier is never a bad investment in areas with routinely high humidity.

Temperature fluctuations cause deterioration. This is the #1 reason to avoid storing your heirlooms in areas of your home that are not temperature controlled, such as your attic, basement, or garage. The best place to store items is in the living area itself. If the temperature is comfortable for you, it will be comfortable for your heirlooms as well.

Sunlight is one of the most deteriorating elements. I recommend keeping all heirlooms away from windows and direct sunlight. Storing items that you don’t view often in a closet, within an archival box, is the best avenue.

For items you do show off, keep them out of direct sunlight. And getting a frame with a UV light filter is also great, regardless of the location of the art. This is actually the reason why many high end frame manufacturers are turning to frames with plastic instead of glass. They can put a UV filter in the plastic and the photograph won’t be damaged if the frame falls off the wall. It is also much lighter to hang on drywall.

Quality of the Heirloom’s Paper: No matter how careful you are with heirlooms, the paper they are printed on will take it’s toll. That is the #1 reason why I recommend buying heirlooms that you plan to pass down to the next generation through one of my professional vendors. Yes, they are more expensive, but there is a reason why. Their quality is far superior. Items bought from consumer labs are rarely guaranteed to last and, if they are, you’re looking at a decade or two of a guarantee. Professional vendors will guarantee an archival quality of a century or more.

This is entirely due to the quality of paper. Archival paper is a special type of paper that has a pH balance that will delay deterioration and preserve your heirlooms for longer. The process to make archival quality paper is more intensive. Therefore the price is higher, but it is definitely worth it.

Quality of Storage Container: If you order an item from a professional lab, the storage box will also be archival. If it doesn’t come in a storage box or you get an item from a consumer lab, you’ll want to make sure you get an archival storage box. Archival storage boxes are made from the same archival paper as discussed above. I personally buy all my heirloom preservation items from Gaylord Archival. I have been very pleased with their quality and level of service. They also have great resources on their website for archival techniques.

Organize, label, and share. Your heirs will only keep things that mean something to them. So make sure that your archival system is organized, so they can find things. Make sure it’s labeled, so they know what and who they are looking at. And make sure it’s valued. Share your heirlooms with your kids, grandkids, and anyone else that has an investment in your family’s story whenever you can. Photographs are just instruments for illustrating stories of past times. They do not hold the stories themselves. You do.

I recommend backing up your images in no less than two different places, ideally three. And have one of those places be offsite. You’ll want to be able to access your images easily, so keep them on your computer and/or on an easily accessible external hard drive. That is place #1.

Place #2 can be another external hard drive. Solid state drives are the most dependable types of drives and what I recommend.

The third place you should save your images is offsite. This can be through a cloud service or by keeping a hard drive kept in another location. I personally recommend the cloud, as that can be easily backed-up to and maintained without leaving your home. But either option will work.

Why offsite? Because the biggest benefit, from a preservation standpoint, of digital files are their ability to withstand flood, fire, and other natural disasters better than print. But that is only true if all of your storage locations can’t be taken out by the same disaster. I actually offer a back-up service for your sessions galleries for this very reason. You will be notified of when it is available in your gallery during your ordering period.

No file type is going to be around forever and no storage device is going to last forever. Technology becomes outdated and no longer supported. And technology fails. I recommend having a maintenance plan in place. Open your files regularly, so that they are used and maintained by the newest version of your photo reading software. Be mindful of file types when updating computers and software to make sure that they will still support that file type. And upgrade your hard drive every few years to prevent the loss of your files through technological failure.

Make sure that someone other than you knows your password. The worst thing that could happen to a well laid out back-up and maintenance plan is that no one can access the images after you’re gone. So come up with a plan for passing down that information.

And don’t make your heir’s job harder by having to figure out where things are on your computer that are important. Pass down that information too.