It’s a chilling scenario, but if your home was on fire or the flood waters were rising, what would you try to save? Of course you would make sure everyone was out of the property and all your pets were safe. But family heirlooms and photos are among the unique mementoes that can never be replaced.

In the last twenty-five years, the photography technology available to the average user has utterly transformed. In that period, we’ve gone from thinking carefully about pressing the shutter on a roll of film then waiting to get them developed, to taking hundreds of pictures of a day out and having it uploaded instantly to the cloud.

Photo prints, once the default, are now an occasional treat, a gift to elderly relatives who haven’t engaged with screen technology. Thanks to cloud storage and smart phones, the majority of our photos and video clips are saved outside our homes in the cloud.

Having said that, many of us do still have family photograph albums, some of which go back to the 19th century.

Which is best– prints or digital images?

Both methods of storing photographs have their benefits. There’s nothing quite like a physical print – you don’t need a device to view it, and it’s easily displayed in a simple frame, or just stuck on the fridge with a magnet.

But digital photographs can be searched and organised with a single click. It’s easy to copy and share them, and as long as you have your cloud back-ups set up, they are protected from flood and fire in the home. However – cloud storage can be vulnerable to hackers, or theft.

Secure storage of digital photographs

We’ve all got that friend who has lost precious photos because their phone was not backing up to the cloud. So, check where your pictures are being stored, and try to make a habit of clearing out unwanted images from time to time.

For extra security, consider putting copies of your photos on to an external hard drive and keeping it in your storage unit. This off-site back-up should be safe from household disasters, and also from any vulnerability in the cloud. Do be aware, though, that electronic storage will date. It was once so normal to share pictures on a CD, but who even has a CD drive now? So it’s important to update your storage every so often.

How to store photographic prints securely

If you have actual prints, they should be stored safely and in a way that will preserve their quality and colour. A photograph is a fragile thing, made of paper and printed with ink, both degradable. To ensure that the images endure, it may be worth scanning your family photos so that you have a digital copy.

When putting pictures into albums, make sure you use good quality ones that are free of acid, lignin and PVC. The paper needs to be ‘archival’ quality, to ensure it doesn’t damage your photos. The New York Times has some advice for this sort of storage.

Keeping an archive of older family photos in a box in the attic or garage is not ideal. Both of those places can be damp and suffer extreme fluctuations in temperature. Why not consider a storage facility? Somewhere dark, where the air will be dry and the temperature constant.

Finding the right storage facility for photos

You can box up your old photos, albums and external hard drives and keep them in a storage facility. They will be safe from the elements and from nibbling little creatures like mice and squirrels who like to invade our attics and garages. A climate-controlled facility is an advantage when storing photographic prints. To discover more about the benefits of climate-controlled storage, see our post.

How much does storage cost monthly?

Climate-controlled storage will be slightly more expensive, but it is hard to put a price on something as precious as family photos. Those images may be all we have left of a happy childhood, a much-loved relative or our holiday of a lifetime.

Climate-controlled storage should give you peace of mind in the future, and you can back that up with a good storage insurance policy. Wondering if you need to insure your stored photographs? Reputable storage companies will insist that you insure your stored goods, and this will be part of your contract. Unfortunately, you can’t insure the actual images, but should the worst happen, your Store and Insure policy will cover your media and stationery. Many storage companies offer their own insurance policies, but they are not always competitively priced. So it’s worth getting a quote from Store and Insure to check you’re not overpaying each month.