Preserving photographs sans negatives

[midnight armadillo]

I still like film. Properly stored negatives will last decades without worries about digital formats, disk failures, etc. However, I have a problem - a giant stack of family photos without their negatives. About 2 years ago my mother-in-law decided to "clean up" and removed the photos from their envelopes and allegedly took the negatives home. She has no memory of this so my chances of ever recovering those negatives (assuming they weren't thrown out) are slim.

So...if you want to preserve a large stack of 4x6 photos of your kids when they were little babies (precious stuff!), what do you do??

[hippywife]

1. I believe you can take them

to a photo shop and have negatives and/or copies made. :hi:

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

2. Check your PM

:thumbsup:

[MajorChode]

3. Have them professionally scanned and put on digital media

Be sure to keep plenty of backup copies.

You can have negatives made, but the prints made from those negatives won't be all that great quality because you're talking about a 4th generation image. Colors will eventually fade on color negatives also. Digital images with theoretically keep forever with no degradation in quality, although many types of digital media can fail over time so it makes sense to periodically back them up.