Your Photos, Off the Shelf at Last

By DAVID POGUE
Published: August 13, 2008

A recipe for Toxic Photo Soup: Layer 1,000 photos in a large, watertight plastic storage tub. Place high on basement shelving unit. Fail to notice small, leaky basement window nearby. Marinate, unattended, three to four years. Open and serve.

Yield: 1,000 blank sheets of sopping photo paper and four gallons of black, stinky, toxic rainwater-chemical soup.

That’s a recipe for disaster. And it’s exactly what happened to the entire photographic record of my wife’s college and med school years. To this day, I have no idea what she looked like back then. For all I know, she could have had an eye patch and a mohawk.

The horrible discovery of her liquefied photo collection underlines two important points about photographic prints. First, they’re generally precious and one of a kind. You can easily lose them forever to fire, flood, misfiling, carelessness or divorce.

Second, most of them are sitting, at this moment, in boxes someplace where nobody ever looks at them. Is that really the proper fate for a photo? More