Family Memories and Color Photo Prints Fade Together

Due to differences in materials and processes used, family color photo prints begin to show deterioration much more rapidly than older black and white photo prints. For a relatively concise explanation of why, read A Consumer Guide to Traditional and Digital Print Stability at the Image Permanence Institute website.

In short, the dyes, pigments, and other materials used to create color photo prints are inherently less stable than those used in black and white prints, and the materials and processes vary more widely. Therefore, it is generally agreed that noticeable fading and color shifts are possible within roughly 50 years, even when prints are properly handled and stored.

Color photo prints became widely available in the 1950s. Therefore, most families are likely to have some portion of their collection demonstrating this color photo print instability, and they can expect to see additional deterioration of aging color prints in the future.

The Image Permanence Institute article suggests that "Color prints, not electronic files, are the best way to ensure that digital images will be preserved for future generations."

I agree that understanding the optimal print technology, storage, and handling of color prints is important, particularly when a decision is made to display prints in albums, scrapbooks, and elsewhere in the home.

However, I believe that creating digital scans of older color prints before they show fading, and properly managing newly created digital files is the best way to preserve and share these images with current and future family generations. In addition to expanded ways to share and distribute the images once in digital format, I believe that we can be confident that clever people will develop ways for us to easily transition digital family history images from generation to generation.

Clearly one should create backups of digital files to avoid complete loss in the event of equipment failure. However, backups of photo prints is equally important, as these are subject fire, floods, and other calamity as well.

Digital file formats, digital storage media, and the technology used to view the digital images will undoubtedly change over time. However, this will not happen overnight. Further, I am willing to bet that my descendants will be smart enough to see these changes coming and transfer family digital image information to evolving technology. I also suspect that there will be competitive business services to help them. There are still a lot of ways to transfer old 8mm movies to DVD, and I am confident that there will be inexpensive and readily available ways to transfer CD and DVD information to the next and subsequent generations of storage media. There are simply too many digital jpeg images on hard drives, CDs, and DVDs to think that these digital images are at greater risk than prints.

I also believe that the transfer of family history images can be made easier and more likely by placing the images in the proper digital format and distributing multiple copies now. Regardless of the care taken to prolong the useful life of one-of-a-kind color prints, many will be faded in another generation or two, and will become more likely to simply be tossed as faded old photos that were not properly captioned and indexed as digital files.

For more suggestions on organizing, preserving and sharing family photos, visit LocalArchiver.com.

To explore creating digital files of your older color prints, or your entire photo print collection, visit ScanDigital.com.