Tips on Care for Your Prints, Albums, and Digital Files

Preserving your newborn photographs in multiple places can help you avoid heartbreak if you should ever lose them. Take it from me, a Portland newborn photographer, who lost most of my daughter’s photos. Yep, read that again. I lost almost all of them. Keep reading for tips on how to care for your prints, albums, and digital files.

I still hate admitting it. I am so grateful for the ones I did back up, like the photos from our newborn photographer and the few I shared on social media (thanks, Facebook time hop!).

Unfortunately, I lost about the first six months of her life from my phone. It made me realize how important it was to back up candid and professional phone photos.

I was scrambling to make my son lunch while my daughter needed something, just trying to make everyone happy and do five things at once.

So, I rushed to grab the heavy glass bowl on the cabinet’s top shelf, and it crashed right into the face of my phone. I couldn’t unlock it; my cloud storage was whole, so that was it. They were gone. I tried everything to get those precious photographs back.

Here are a few tips that are easy to do and ensure you will retain those precious newborn photos as I did.

Back up Digital Photos in Multiple Places

Upon delivery of all of my photos to every family I photograph, I encourage them to save their pictures in multiple places, such as a cloud storage service and a USB drive, two USB drives, or an external hard drive and cloud service.

This almost guarantees you’ll always have one set if you accidentally lose the other. I use SmugMug and large external hard drives to save my photos. However, I love having just a few places to go to access my photos, so I prefer the WD Elements hard drive and my cloud storage from SmugMug.

Print Your Photographs

Most of us love to share our photographs of our kids and family on social media, but it’s essential to print your newborn pictures so you and your family can enjoy them. Print your photos with a quality lab, like Millers Lab, which is the lab I choose for my professional photographs and my clients.

I encourage families to avoid places that offer cheap prints. They will not look the same and will likely not age well. Sure, choose an economical print lab like Shutterfly for your thousands of phone photos. However, I highly encourage a quality print lab for the photographs you’ve invested in.

Store Your Prints & Albums Safely

The way you store your newborn photographs impacts the longevity of your prints. Keeping them out of direct sunlight, in a cool/dry area of your home, and avoiding fingerprints directly on photos will help preserve your newborn photos.

Also, please don’t forget to keep photos together with paper clips, rubber bands, or tape. I love looking at pictures with my kids, especially my four-year-old son’s newborn photos.

However, I helped him handle them carefully and turned the page in the photo album for him. I know it can be challenging when they are little as they want to do it themselves. However, they are not little forever, and they will be glad to have them to look back on when they are adults too.