What is the best way to store photos? I get asked that all the time by new photographers. If you’re into Photography, choosing the right storage for your photographs is just as important as the photographs themselves. In this day and age of “I need to post that picture on Facebook“, the print medium is actually making a return. With apps and websites that have simplified the path to printing, a whole new generation of people are finding they love the feel of a print in their hands. The process of physically handling the images themselves make them seem all that more real.
With the resurgence of film people find they now have prints to manage. The archival storage of digital files is one thing, but with film photographs, or even digital prints, it’s important to save and store your photographs correctly. This can add decades to the life of a print. In some cases the negatives are lost and the print is the only physical thing that remains.
We’ve found a couple different ways we like to store our old, and new, photographs. It really depends on a few factors. The first thing is what kind of a person are you? If you’re like me you like the photos to tell a story. I like to keep my pictures in order so an album is a really great way to keep my photos arranged by date, and even by theme. Although some of my photographic archive is kept in boxes.
Each one serves its own purpose and you have to ask yourself a few simple questions. How many photos do you have? Where are they being stored? How often do you look at them? Things like that. The images in my storage boxes aren’t chronological like my albums but are kept in boxes based on time period. My Albums are more of less a curated view of a period of time. I can pull from the storage boxes and create a ‘best of’ for the album. That way when I pull out an album to show someone, they don’t have to sift through hundreds of boring out takes like they would if we broke open a box of prints.
Each method of storage serves a very different purpose even though ideally they are each doing the very same thing which is keeping them preserved and safe.
So here are the details for my Archival Photo Storage solution:
THIS vs THAT
 ARCHIVAL Photo Storage Box X46BBK
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 Post-Style Pocket Photo Album APHABSP
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Both solutions are stand alone options. Nothing says you have to use both but it’s just what I prefer. The boxes hold more, but the albums are a nice way to review. After all, what good is a photograph if you can look at them. I hope this information helps you make the right decisions for your growing photograph collection.
Cheers, and keep shooting.
