By Louisa Jaggar
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, April 13, 2006; H04

Of all the personal losses large and small that I have experienced, one that I have never been able to reconcile is losing hundreds of photos of my children.

I had just moved into a new house and stored all our family snapshots in the basement. At the time I was unaware the basement possessed a fatal flaw: It flooded. With the first major snowstorm and subsequent thaw came three feet of ice-cold floodwater. I lost everything in the basement, including my children's childhood photographs. The worst part of losing these images is that I couldn't go back and retake that picture of my daughter at age 3 by the pool, the one where she is making the funny face, or the photo of my son at 5 chasing the geese moments before they turned on him. But if I had known better, I could have saved them all.

Prints from the photo shop are basically plastic. If these become wet, the biggest dangers are mold and mildew. Since neither develops on wet photographs -- only on damp ones -- keep the photos wet by placing them in a bucket of water until you have time to deal with them. Never pull photos apart if they are stuck together; this only causes further damage. Place them in water and wait until they separate. Then remove them without touching the surface of the actual photograph. To dry, place them on a clean, smooth surface; blotter paper or fiberglass window screens work well. Then let them air-dry. If there is serious damage, take them to a photo conservator. You can locate one at http://aic.stanford.edu/ .

Digital photographs printed on inkjet printers are a different matter entirely. Alison Nordstrom, curator of photographs at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, N.Y., warns, "Digital hard copies printed from an inkjet printer have greater stability in maintaining colors and lasting images, but if they get even slightly wet the ink will create lovely colored water." Your only strategy is to make sure water never comes in contact with your digital prints.

Digital cameras have changed the landscape of how we take our photos and raised questions about how we should save them. According to Robert Burley, director of the master's degree program in photographic preservation and collections management at Ryerson University in Toronto, "Hard copies are the right choice if you are interested in long-term preservation. Always make at least two hard copies of those prints you most cherish." Send an extra copy to a family member or friend, and even if there is a flood or fire, your favorite photos will survive. Why not rely on CDs, DVDs or your computer? Aside from the fact that hard drives and files can become corrupted, computers, their software and file systems change alarmingly quickly.

Most photos that have survived decades have survived as a result of benign neglect. Throw your photos in a drawer, and 50 years later they are still intact, if perhaps a bit faded. Computers do not allow that luxury. NASA lost 10 to 20 percent of the vital data images from the Viking Mission to Mars because of technological obsolescence. In other words, they lost important data because they couldn't retrieve the images from the computers they were stored on.

"Preserving collections means that every three to five years you have to actively move the photos from one file format to another, from one software system to another, and one hardware system to another. Not many people have the time to migrate all those images on a regular basis," says Burley.

To display photographs, the first step is duplicating those images. While black-and-white photographs deteriorate slowly, color photos show signs of fading within a few years. Digital prints, if you use pigment-based inks and acid-free paper, will last years with little sign of damage. Still, if you are thinking in terms of preserving over generations, the best option is to display only duplicates. When the duplicate fades, make another copy.

In this high-tech world, the decisions on how to duplicate, whether for display or in order to save a hard copy of a digital image, is not difficult if you follow the flowchart above.

The process for storing your photos, whether conventional or digital prints, is the same. First, gently dust with compressed air (hold the can about a foot away), place photos in an acid-free box, interweaving acid-free tissue between photos, unless the photo is a cyanotype (blue-print photos from the 1800s). A good temperature is 65 or 70 degrees, and 30 to 40 percent is an ideal humidity level.

As Nordstrom says, "The real threat is great fluctuations of temperatures. Therefore, avoid the attic and the basement. One is too hot and one is too damp." She also recommends using cotton gloves when handling photos because oils on fingers will adhere to photos and eventually discolor them. You also can store them in archival-grade photo albums (avoid "magnetic" or "no stick").

Digital cameras grant instant gratification, with images appearing as soon as you take them. But there is a downside. In 1996, Dirk Halstead shot a photo of Monica Lewinsky hugging President Clinton at a fundraiser. Two years later, why was Halstead the only photographer to have this infamous photo from an event attended by many other photographers? Halstead shot with film; it is believed the other photographers shot with digital. Lewinsky was unknown at the time, and the other photographers probably erased her image with the click of a button.

Erasing pictures with digital cameras is a common practice, one that people often come to regret. Remember, what is important in hindsight is often impossible to predict. So always think twice before you hit delete.

Writer and collector Louisa Jaggar is the co-author of "Saving Stuff: How to Care for and Preserve Your Collectibles, Heirlooms, and Other Prized Possessions," written with Smithsonian senior conservator Don Williams (Fireside Press, 2005). If you have questions about caring for your stuff, e-mail her atlouisajaggar@aol.com.