How to Preserve Vacation Memories

What do you do with all the photographs, ticket stubs and brochures you collect on your trips? If you’ are like most people, they end up at the bottom of a drawer, or in a box hidden away in the closet – never to be seen again. Why not take a few steps to preserve those vacation memories, and enjoy them for years to come?

Acid Free Photo Albums

The old-style photo albums have magnetic pages that sort of glue the photograph onto the page. We have sense learned that the substance used to make the pages sticky actually harm photographs because they are not acid and lignin free. This is why many of your older relatives photographs are yellow in color!

You can better store your photographs (and even ticket stubs, flyers or brochures collected from your travels) in scrapbook albums, albums that are acid and lignin free (they’ll say so on the packaging), or in photo boxes meant for such storage.

Scan and Digitize

Inexpensive technology makes it feasible to scan your photographs and vacation paraphanalia into your computer and save to CD or DVD. You can create fancy slideshows and movies, or simply store them as individual files on CD to preserve them. Just remember to store the CD or DVD in a dry location, away from direct sunlight and make more than one copy that is stored in more than one location (in case damage occurs to one of your copies!)

Once scanned into your computer, you may want to take it a step further and create a photo book. There are a number of websites that allow you to upload photographs and create books that can be printed in soft or hard copy formats.

Scrapbooking

If you enjoy working with your hands and being creative, you may enjoy scrapbooking. Scrapbook supplies are available at craft stores, dollar stores and even the local Wal-Mart. You can have fun saving photos and ticket stubs on decorative paper backgrounds and adding stickers and other embellishments to create an album you’ll be sure to share and treasure for years to come.

If you’re not sure how to get started, just pick up any scrapbook magazine from the store or search the internet. Scrapbooking is a multi-million dollar per year industry so you won’t have any difficulty finding information about how to get started with the memory preservation hobby!