Rescue From The "Chemical Sandwich of Doom" on Sorting Saturday

During a recent sorting episode, an album turned up in the Family Home. Husband and I were the star subjects as it was an album of snapshots from our wedding day, taken by the unofficial photographer (aka Dad)! I gasped in horror when I opened the album and saw what was inside. The pictures were neatly arranged in one of those horrible sticky "magnetic" albums that we now know are dangerous for our beloved photographs. Hence the name, Chemical Sandwich of Doom, given by one of my favorite archivists, Sally Jacobs, The Practical Archivist. (You can read even more about the Chemical Sandwich of Doom here.)

I decided to try out my new Flip Pal on this album. So one evening while watching TV, I carefully removed the pictures one by one, scanned them using the Flip Pal, and placed them in a new archival safe album. When the scanning was done, it was easy to load the pictures onto my laptop, in one batch, using the following filename format:

LastName_GroomBride_YYY-MM-DD_wedding

As a side note, I also found a "Mother's Album" containing pictures from the same day whose materials were much friendlier to photos than the Chemical Sandwich of Doom. You could definitely see the difference in the condition of the pictures between the two albums.

Another rescue mission accomplished.


© 2011, copyright Michelle Goodrum