Beginner photography tips / How to keep your photos safe / How can I make money with my camera? /
Five steps to perfect portraits / Tips for storing photos and negatives

Tips for storing photos and negatives

So you enjoy taking pictures of your family or a recent vacation destination. No problem. Everyone loves memories to treasure and photos offer the best way to do that. But what happens when your picture pile grows and grows with no end in sight. You keep thinking you will have time to organize the photos but that free time never materializes. Here are some ways to get a handle on your accumulation of photos and their accompanying negatives while keeping them preserved until you really have a free moment to put them in a memory album or special photo pages.

The best way to handle the delicate negatives is to store them in archival pages in a binder. Most discount stores or office supply stores offer a variety of archival options and pages suitable for 35mm negatives are what you will need if you are using a standard point-and-shoot or SLR camera. Once you have these pages, a large binder is where you will store them. Each page has room to title what the negatives are from and a place for the date. So start today, by putting your negatives away and you will have that much less to do tommorrow. This also helps organize photos should you want reprints or enlargements. You will only need to go to your binder and find the right page and Voila. Off to the developer you go.

If you really don't have time for putting negatives in pages but you want to do something with them, a short-term solution is to put all the negatives, if they come in their own sleeves from the developer, and store them in a box. Again, discount and office supply stores have these personal boxes and they are inexpensive enough to corral your negatives until you round-up the time to organize them more efficiently in a binder.

Photos can also be stored in archival pages found at the same discount stores. Depending on whether or not you have 3 1/2 x 5 inch pictures or 4 x 6 inch pictures, you will need to choose the appropriate size. Another binder for storing the pictures will be useful to organization. Not only will you be able to access your photos quickly and easily but you will have a temporary photo album should you want to make a more creative memory album at a later date. This will help keep the photos in order and seem less intimidating when you want to tackle your photos with more creativity.

Photo storage boxes are also an option for pictures, but often moisture will cause them to stick together and that could lessen the quality of the pictures and possibly cause them permanent damage.

Your photos are memories of your lifetime, so take great care when deciding how to organize them and preserve them for the future.