Preserving Your Family Photos: A Generation’s Important, Urgent Task

Gen X take note, the clock is ticking on your family’s old photos. Many of the stories they tell — names, places, and the significance of specific moments — could be lost forever if you don’t take responsibility for them.

Antonia inherited a large collection of family photo albums after her mother passed away. Full of moments from her ancestors’ travels, trips and big life milestones, they were beautiful, if a little dusty, and she loved looking through them with her own children. When she did so, however, she was shocked at how few of their questions she was able to answer.

She had always intended to sit down with her mother and go through the photos, but life got busy, and they never got around to it. Now it was too late. With no other relatives left to ask, the details of those pictures were lost forever, leaving her with no way to connect them to her family’s narrative.

In today’s snap-happy, socially-networked world, we have never been more obsessed with taking and sharing photographs of our lives. Meanwhile, however, the older images and albums we might have in our possession are left gathering dust in the assumption that having been fine until now they’ll be fine for a bit longer. But these photos, pictures that bring life to the stories of our childhoods, the memories of our parents and ancestors, will not only fade with every generation that passes, the entire history depicted within them will dwindle and be lost forever.

A Generational Responsibility

Unlike previous generations, today’s adults are in a unique position which their parents probably never faced themselves so urgently. With many sandwiched between caring for aging parents and raising children of our own, we are the new ‘grown ups’ responsible for bridging the gap between generations past and generations yet to come. With families more dispersed and life moving at a breakneck speed, those stories can easily be low on the priority list. But unless they are actively preserved they are likely to be lost.

Why Now?

There’s an immediacy to this issue that cannot be overstated. While technology allows us to capture new memories with ease, the memories embedded in old photographs —especially the specifics — are finite resources. The only people who can share those names, places, and stories are those who lived through them or heard about them firsthand. Once they are gone, there’s no recovering that knowledge. Digitising photographs while older relatives are still around gives us the opportunity to record their voices, their stories, and their explanations in real time.

How to begin

Taking on this task may feel daunting, especially when you consider the potential volume of photos stored in albums, drawers, and shoeboxes. But breaking the project into smaller, manageable pieces can help. Start with a few key family albums and, importantly, make time to sit down with your older relatives sooner rather than later. Ask them about the people in the photos, the locations, and the significance of the moments captured. This exercise not only brings families closer together, but it allows the continuity of your family’s stories, so they can be passed down to future generations. Be prepared for an element of "history repeating itself' too. This is when patterns in generational history are revealed and can sometimes bt quite the surprise.

Uncover the stories

It’s about saving the stories they represent. The grandparents or older relatives who can identify who’s who in a faded wedding portrait or recount the tale behind a sun-drenched family reunion picture are growing older, and with them, those memories are at risk of disappearing forever.

Inevitable damage

Digitising your family’s old photographs also saves the images from inevitable physical degradation. Exposure to light causes fading (ironically it’s those favourite photos we have on display that are most at risk) while moisture and improper storage conditions can lead to mould, warping and other irreversible damage. Worse still, a single disaster — be it a flood, fire, or other catastrophe — can and does wipe out entire collections in an instant.

Dan Potts grew up in the Scottish Borders with his family’s treasured photo collection, which documented their life over several generations. They were well organised and stored in the basement in old albums and boxes. Although he had considered digitising them, he never got around to it. One year, bad floods hit his area, and water completely destroyed the albums. Dan lost not just the photos but the handwritten notes on the back of many, which detailed names and places that were no longer remembered by anyone in the family. “I thought I had time,” he said later, reflecting on how the tangible connection to his past was swept away by the disaster. We helped to recover some of the images but by then, the damage had been done.

The wonderful upside

By digitising your photos, you can safeguard them against these threats, ensuring that your family’s visual history is preserved and accessible for future generations. Once digitised, these images can be stored securely online, shared among family members, and even printed in high-quality formats. And while the physical prints may still carry sentimental value, knowing that a backup exists will always offer peace of mind.

Once the images are digital, they can then be packaged into digital albums, video montages, or even interactive family trees. This allows younger generations — who are often more comfortable engaging with digital media — to connect with their heritage in new and meaningful ways.

Crucially, it also means the responsibility to keep those stories alive is no longer just on you.

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If you have "Sort out the old photos" on a to-do list of yours, drop us a line today and let us help you deal with it once and for all.

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