Montreal Family Photography: Protecting your photos when disaster strikes
Preparation is all you can do.
~Thomas Joshua Cooper
Here in Montreal we’ve seen our share of terrible weather events over the years, but on the whole we have it pretty good relative to some other areas of the world. That said, Montreal was recently deluged by the remnants of Hurricane Debby; turning roads into swimming pools, causing power outages and flooding homes.
I am very grateful that my basement was spared, but friends, neighbours and fellow Montrealers are now living through the stress of recovering from loss and damage. As a photographer I do believe that I think about the protection of photos more than most, but as a human, I too have blind spots when it comes to different aspects of daily life. For example, I ensure I have backup systems for all of my photographs, but I too had my parent’s old family albums stored about an inch off the floor under the basement t.v. unit!
Over the weekend I heard heart-breaking stories of loss of irreplaceable personal items and keepsakes. I know that while I didn’t incur any flooding, I could easily be affected next time around. I considered the changes I need to make to better prepare myself and protect the things I cherish the most in my home. And not just against floods, but also fire. For a few years now I have already thought about emergency preparedness such as having a first aid and disaster kit kept in my car (after the snowstorm that stranded drivers on highway 13 in 2017), and recently started to think more diligently about my home preparedness.
We can’t reverse what has happened but what we can do is to look at how we can protect against future losses. Here are a few ways to protect your most treasured photographs and albums:
Move photographs out of the basement
Besides being at risk of flooding from weather events, basements are more subject to temperature fluctuations and humidity than other parts of our homes, making them less than ideal spots to store things like photo albums and loose photos in paper boxes. These conditions can cause eventual degradation, yellowing, peeling and blistering of photographs. Besides that, it occurred to me that basements are often where things go when they don’t have a place in our daily lives - but my family photographs are not of the same importance as the unused crock pot, or the oversized serving dish I only bring out once a year!
I am an advocate of ensuring our photos are printed and displayed prominently in our homes because they make a statement to all who live and visit there about what we value most, and so I realized that I had a blind spot to how I treated some of the historical and inherited heirloom albums that hold my family history. Immediately on Saturday following the storm, I brought my family albums upstairs to the living room. All of the board games I had kept in the living room went downstairs. In hindsight, I couldn’t believe the placement - if my basement had flooded, Scrabble and Monopoly would have been safe on the main floor, while albums documenting my late parent’s childhood had been at great risk. Not only should we bring the albums and photos to an upper floor but we should provide them with a place of honour (even if out of sight) within our homes. A place easily accessible should you ever need to evacuate, but also for the kids to have access to, encouraging them to peek at their family history as a great singular or family activity.
If it’s impossible to store elsewhere, place photos and albums into sealable plastic bags or bins, and store them on upper shelves and not within a few feet of the floor. For extra protection in vulnerable areas subject to moisture, double or triple bag items in sealable plastic bags, or seal first in a bag and then in a bin.
Digitize old photos
As mentioned above, old photos are at risk of being compromised by external conditions such as temperature and humidity. We mostly don’t have negatives from these photos and the copies we have are the only copies that exist. Besides gradual degradation, fire is a big enemy here.
There are services that can scan/digitize old family photos. While you may have a wealth of photos, it may be too daunting a task to digitize them all. In this case, choose a selection of very important ones such as wedding photos and digitize those. I have done this for several of my parent’s photos. If you don’t have time, funds or wherewithal to tackle this task, use your phone camera in the short term. Place a photo on a plain surface in an area that is well and evenly lit, like a dining or kitchen table during the brightest part of the day. Turn off overhead lights as they often cause unwanted glare, colour-casting or shadows. Hover your phone overhead evenly so that the photo is not distorted. Avoid zooming in as image quality can suffer when we do that. Instead, move your phone physically down towards the photo until the photo fills the frame.
An additional option is to purchase a fire-safe box and to store a selection of the most important prints in there.
This process can also apply to important documents, family heirlooms that aren’t photos and to children’s artwork, all of which may have to be kept in basement, attic or storage locker as we may lack space in our available living space. For example, I received an old and battered teddy bear from a relative that had belonged to my father when he was a child. Teddy is in a box, but I took photos because teddy is on the verge of disintegration. If the physical items are lost, we at least have a memory.
Print digital photos
My office is in the basement and that may be the case for you as well. This means that computers that reside in that space are at risk. Technology is amazing for us but it’s also not infallible. In this digital age we can snap and snap because we can, but then often leave all the photos inside the technology and they go no further. In the film days, you couldn’t physically keep the photos inside the technology (the camera) because if you did, you would never be able to view them. We had to remove the film from the camera and get it developed. These days, because we have the ability to instantly view our photos, we can see them and also just keep them inside the technology which is now phones and computers. But that doesn’t serve us long term and places our memories at risk. And as the expression goes, you can’t hang a usb above the fireplace mantel.
Technology can be compromised by water, fire or outages/ short circuits. Just as we want to digitize old photos as a backup, we want to print new photos as a backup as well. Each system supports the other and depending on what disaster may strike, you are protected.
If you have family members/ siblings who would also cherish the photos you seek to preserve, print copies for them too. That way if one copy is destroyed, there is usually another intact in someone else’s photo album.
Activate back up systems
Hard drives fail. Phones can become permanently locked, broken, stolen, dropped into water. Even beyond exceptional circumstances like we had with unprecedented rain, these things can and do occur daily. I too had a scare when my phone just malfunctioned one day; apps started behaving badly and upon reboot, I couldn’t start it again. After several hours on the phone with Apple Support, I was able to get it to turn on. I lost some local data but my photos had been safe in the cloud.
As a photographer, I do pay a lot of attention to my backup systems. I have several to ensure the safety of the photographs I have been entrusted to take. If I lose my own photos it’s a personal loss, but if I lose a client’s photos, that loss is significantly magnified. I have had memory cards corrupt, and I’ve had hard drives fail and thankfully my backups were there. In our community we say that it’s not if a technology will fail, but when. It is hard to keep up with the pace of new technology and to think about backups and syncing in our busy lives, but it’s something we must attend to, for peace of mind and ultimate protection.
Use iCloud to sync the photos on your phone. Use apps such as Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive for online backups. Clear out apps regularly of photos that aren’t save-worthy if you wish to stay within the free limits of these providers. Curation is important too - if you took 100 photos of your toddler on a swing at the park, keep the few that are the keepers and discard the rest. We are not deleting our families when we delete photos and the reality is, people close eyes, photos are blurry or we have missed the moment.
It’s also a good idea to have backup external drives or usb’s that mirror your computer’s hard drive. Storage is cheap these days, and an external drive can be put into a fire-safe box or stored somewhere away from threat of water. Another idea to keep a back up drive of the most important photos at a different location, such as someone else’s home (in a safe place too), a place of business if permitted/ available or a safety deposit box. Some banks provide a safety deposit box with certain banking plans so you may already have access to one, or can add this service on separately.
Consider systems available through professionally taken photographs, or take note for future sessions
Most professional photographers keep backup copies of client images, at least for a certain amount of time. If you have lost professional images in this current situation, reach out to your photographer. If your photos were delivered through an online gallery they may still be accessible, or may be placed back online by the photographer. If not, then they still may be retrievable from an archive. Note that some photographers charge a fee for archive retrieval as it can be time-consuming to locate client records from some years ago.
Some photographers do not maintain permanent archives, or they may but for only a certain period of time. If you will be considering family photos due to irretrievable loss, or considering a family session in future, be sure to inquire about backup policies. While we as photographers aren’t in the business of professional storage or backup systems, many of us do maintain copies for extended periods of time. In recent years online galleries have been the best way to deliver photographs (over usb’s or file transfer services) because you can organize images easily and connect them to professional print labs for convenient printing of high quality products. Most photographers keep galleries active for a short period of time (as we may experience data limits based on the plans and services we use) but usually clients can auto-renew their galleries for a small fee, and assure the safety of the photographs you have invested in.
If you have photos that have been damaged in this flood
I found a post from a photographer in New Zealand who wrote a comprehensive article on saving damaged photos after her community was hit by Cyclone Gabrielle. While she is also not an expert in recovery, it seems she did good research and was quite thorough.