Have you looked at your wedding photos lately?

Digitize and preserve your older photos before they degrade and you lose them forever.

We look so young. The professional photos like this one have aged well.

Your wedding may be one of your most precious memories. For most married couples, if they have just one photo album it’s probably their wedding album. Wedding albums are filled with photos commemorating the big day – not just for the happy couple but for their guests too. They provide a means to relive the special moment, the activities of the day, and all of the people who helped make it special.

Because it is freezing here in Chicago, I spent the first part of this past weekend working around the house. While cleaning some things out of the office, I came across my wedding album. I haven’t opened it for a while but I sat down to take a look. It invoked bittersweet feelings – joy at the day but sadness as there are several photos of friends and family who had passed away over the last 20+ years. I realized that this album contained some of the last photos I have of loved ones.

After a few moments of perusing the photos I noticed that while the professional photos in the album still look great, many of the snapshots are starting to fade and degrade. My wedding was almost 25 years ago – back then the big trend was to place throwaway cameras on every table for guests to document the day from their point of view. No digital cameras, no phones, and not the greatest quality photographs. I also have a bunch of beautiful black and white photos my sister-in-law took for us. It was on these that I noticed the most damage, many of the photos have tiny spots of lost color. I only noticed it when they caught the light in just the right way, but once I saw it I couldn’t unsee it.

Not the sharpest photo, but it clearly shows the degredation.

Given that I was not going out anywhere (thanks Covid and 5° temps!) I decided to digitize my wedding album. The photos in my album are all held in place with corners, so it was easy to pop them out, scan them, and place them back in the album. There were a few large photos that I had glued in; I was able to scan these as well by carefully handling the book so as not to damage the spine. I do not recommend removing photos that have been glued into an album - it is very hard to remove them without damaging the photo. I then took a look at the scans and did a bit of photo restoration where needed, added keywords, and added them to my digital library. I was able to rescue many of these old photos, at least in terms of fixing the areas that had degraded.

Much better! Spots begone!

Here is the full size photo, with some light sharpening and color edits.

There was nothing I could do about the poor quality of some of the initial photos – as it turns out that trend of placing throwaway cameras on tables wasn’t the best in terms of preserving the day, although there sure are a lot of funny photos! Probably the best part is that I was able to spend the evening sending some of these photos (that I can now access on my phone) to friends, sparking some fun conversation and reliving our wedding all over again, some 20+ years later.

Please take a look at your older albums to see if they need to be digitally preserved before the photos degrade. Or just think about if you would like the same easy access to these photos as you have with your more recent photos. As memories fade, our photos are here to remind us of our past.

If you would like some help with your photos and albums, let me know! A digitized wedding album would make a great gift for your loved one.