Protect Your Family Photos for the Next Generation

They say, “A picture is worth a thousand words” and we all know that family photos are priceless. So you definitely want to preserve them for the next generation – but how?

With just a few key steps, you can protect your family photos for generations to come! Here’s how to get started.

Organize, Record, and Preserve

The first step is to figure out which photos you want to keep. Maybe discard some of those landscape shots from old vacations – but whichever ones you do choose to save, make sure to organize them in a way that makes sense to you. For instance, you may prefer to keep the photos in straight chronological order, or grouped separately according to major events in your family history.

Another crucial step: record information about the images! Over time, you may forget what’s happening in the photos, or perhaps only Grandma knows who the people in the pictures are. The best thing you can do for future generations is to write down important info that may otherwise be lost to time.

Finally, you’ll want to preserve all your photos so they stay in good condition for decades to come. Use high-quality, acid-free sleeves and protectors, archival storage boxes, and tissue to prevent images sticking to each other. For photos that you want to regularly pore through and show off, create a photo album using the highest-quality materials you can find.

Digitize Your Physical Photographs

Even more important than keeping your physical photos safe is to preserve them digitally. After all, anything can happen to your photographs – they could get lost or stolen, or damaged or destroyed in disasters – but digitizing them will give you the extra protection you need for the long term.

The digitization process is surprisingly easy: all you need is a scanner! Check out our previous blog post describing how to scan your photos and get them saved onto your computer. From there, the possibilities are endless!

Make an Archival-Quality Photobook

Your newly digitized photos can even be used to create a high-quality, professionally printed photo book. There are plenty of online services that make the process fast and easy – just upload your digital photos and arrange them in any of hundreds of professionally designed templates… or come up with your own!

A few of the most popular photo book services are Shutterfly, Mixbook, and Picaboo. You can choose from softcover, hardcover, specialty materials like leather and fabric, and select exactly how many pages you need. Best of all, you can print multiple copies and hand them out to loved ones so everyone has their own photobook to enjoy!

Use Long-term Data Storage

In addition to physical photographs and keepsakes, you can gain peace of mind with another crucial layer of protection: long-term digital storage. Fortunately, there are a ton of options at your fingertips: desktop storage, flash drives, SD cards, external hard drives, and cloud storage, just to name a few.

Digital storage is so important because it drastically mitigates risk. The more places you have your family photos stored, the less likely you are to lose them – and some forms of digital storage even give you the advantage of the cloud, making your files available anytime, anywhere with an Internet connection.

However, there are still some drawbacks. Computers, drives, and memory cards can all be corrupted, destroyed, or lost. And third-party commercial cloud storage can put your digital files and personal information at risk, with hacking, breaches, and abuse of personal data becoming more and more common.

Create a Family Photo + Video Vault with Amber

Imagine being able to create a digital time machine for your family photos, which not only remains accessible at any time but also stays secure for the future. Our award-winning Digital Life Platform called Amber (recently selected as Gadget Flow Editor’s Pick!) allows you to do just that.

Amber offers secure local storage with convenient (and secure) remote access so you can enjoy the best of both worlds. Simply upload your treasured digital assets to Amber to create a secure Family Photo Vault that even incorporates home videos!

But there’s more to Amber than meets the eye. With our cutting-edge technology, you’ll enjoy Simple + Reliable + Secure features, such as:

• Simple Setup with Easy to Use Amber Companion Apps.
• Double Data Storage with Dual Hard Drives to ensure your data is protected - twice.
• Automatically Organize Photos with on-device Facial Recognition Technology (learn more about our AI technology here)
• Auto Camera-Roll Backup and easy upload + sync for photos and videos
• Access Data from anywhere with end-to-end protection

Plus, as we work to integrate even more features and new technology, you’ll receive free software upgrades – so Amber will only get better over time! Your precious family photos deserve nothing less. It’s an investment that will protect your cherished digital memories so you can pass them down from one digital generation to the next, seamlessly and easily.

Amber. Because some things in life only happen once.

To learn more, see our Amber FAQ page and How It Works.