Photo Fading Factors - A Reason to Consider Having Your Photos Printed Online

Inkjet printers are the most common choice for home photo printing, and printer manufacturers have made great strides in providing relatively inexpensive equipment to satisfy home printing needs. Compared to just a few years ago, we can now create astonishing photo prints at home with available color and resolution capabilities.

However, a risk that we should all be aware of is the permanence of the image we print at home. Each printer manufacturer and office supply company offers us a complex choice of inks to feed our printers, and each of these have varied qualities that impact the original printed image and how long it will survive before colors shift and fade. Equally mysterious is the wide choice of papers to place beneath the ink image as these papers also deteriorate and will perhaps impact the inked image above.

In order to be confident that your home prints will last as long as possible, you would need to learn the language of paper and ink quality characteristics and conduct some comparative research. Wilhelm Imaging Research is the best know image permanence testing organization, and they publish test results for many brand name inks and papers. Better papers and inks can be expected to reflect a higher cost. This is something to consider the next time you reach for bargain private label photo paper at your local office supply superstore.

On the other hand, large online printers such as Shutterfly.com need to be able to satisfy the questions and printing needs of their most sophisticated professional photographer customers. The online printers' professional staff and buying clout allow them to identify and purchase the best materials for initial and long lasting quality. It is also important to note that processes used by major online printers are simply not the same as those available in the home.

Although printing at home may provide some instant gratification and you may like the apparent added control over the editing and printing process, you are probably not using materials that will maximize the enjoyment of the image by you and perhaps future generations. The effort to identify the best materials for your home printer combined with the added cost of these materials may actually exceed the cost of having your prints made professionally. Even if you use quality materials at home, you may still not attain the same consistent high quality available through major online printers.

For a description of materials used by at least one major online printer, go to Shutterfly.com, use the menu near the page top to access "help" and then search on "Photographic Print Durability" once in the help section.

It is clearly useful to have a photo printing capacity in the home for many photo projects. However, if the purpose of printing a photo includes the goal of long lasting enjoyment, perhaps into future generations, one should consider the image permanence issues raised above, and at least explore having the print made professionally and conveniently by a major online printer.

For a broader discussion of printing photos, read the article titled Printing Quality Photo and Document Digital Images at LocalArchiver.com.

Feedback on Photo and Document Preservation and Sharing Topics Most Welcomed

This blog and its related website, LocalArchiver.com, have now been up and running for about three months. In addition to starting this blog in June, articles have been added to the LocalArchiver.com website and additional features such as print friendly pages and the ability to email page links to others are now available.

I am receiving some welcomed feedback on the usefulness of the site. This feedback is much appreciated, as it is the primary way of knowing whether others are finding the website content useful. This feedback also lets me know that the site is beginning to meet its primary goal of helping families and community historical societies save time and money in their efforts to organize, preserve, and share photos and documents in their image collections.

Feedback to date has been positive. Some kind excerpts from emails include:

"Great job on developing a user friendly and informative web
site."

"...Your site is fabulous! I just checked out your blog, too. Very nice. Extremely informative, too.... I have fallen heir to a great deal of very old photographs and letters. You're helping me preserve things as they ought to be. I'm forever grateful for that. "

"I don't know how I stumbled on your site but thankfully I did! ......I still have a long way to go but I have a much clearer vision now and feel the weight has lifted from my shoulders. A HUGE thank you! Your site, resources and links are wonderful...."

Feedback such as this has helped me to feel that I am on the right track and that some visitors are finding the content at LocalArchiver.com useful.

I ask that visitors also let me know what they feel is missing, inaccurate, or unclear. Many of the topics in the website are subject to ongoing debate (best scanning resolutions, best number of pixels for quality print resolution, etc., etc.). The LocalArchiver.com offers what it considers to be the best information available, consolidated and presented in a way to be useful to a non-professional.

Clearly, the "rightness" of a given solution is somewhat dependent on circumstances. The "correct" image capture resolution and digital file format selection will likely be different for a family vacation photo and a professional landscape photo.

Likewise, a large urban museum with a full time professional staff will likely catalog collection images differently than a community historical society. Please keep providing feedback, both positive and constructive, so that we can jointly make LocalArchiver.com as useful as possible, and to represent the varied views of visitors to this blog and to LocalArchiver.com.

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.

Now is a Good Time to Plan Off-Season Photo and Document Preservation and Sharing Projects

The summer months always seem a bit busier than other seasons of the year.

Families travel, vacation, attend reunions, and participate in a broad range of other seasonal pleasures with friends and extended family. The end result is likely an increase in the many photo images that are already on the shelf or in the computer, and the number of photos that you hope to organize and share someday. Families may not have time to take on a major photo organizing and sharing project during the hectic summer. However, thinking about your off-season project goals now can be helpful later.

As you capture memories of a trip, you may think about how to best caption and arrange a photo book to tell the story of the trip. Keeping a short journal of the trip may be helpful. As you attend reunions, you may want to talk to other family members about how to coordinate the sharing of one-of-a-kind photos held by others. You might find out that a particular family member has a growing interest in starting a genealogy project, and another is already interested in organizing and sharing extended family photos. A family discussion of such things can lead in interesting directions.

Volunteers at community historical societies are often quite busy with summer season fund raising fairs, extended collection viewing hours, and perhaps building or display renovations.

However, chances are that volunteer interest and participation are at a peak, and some discussions about off-season projects can be very fruitful.

When extended family and historical society member interest in photos and other images is at a peak, establishing some preliminary photo and document preservation and sharing project plans for the off-season can provide some momentum into the slower off seasons.

For additional "HowTo" information, and family and community historical society project ideas, visit LocalArchiver.com.