What would you miss most if your home were flooded with water or mud? Chances are, your family photos and scrapbooks rise to the top of the list!
Many of your most precious photos don’t have to be a thing of the past after water damage. Do you know how to best handle and clean your photos?
Read on for tips to help keep your family mementos from becoming a thing of the past.
If your pictures get wet, time is definitely of the essence when it comes to saving them. Start by working with photos that you can’t replace by making a new print from a negative.
Any photo in a frame is also a top priority, because a photo will stick to the glass as it dries. To remove the photo, try holding both the photo and the glass together under rinse water so that the stream will gently separate them.
Photos stacked or stored in boxes will begin to mold or stick together after only a couple of days, so try to get to them as quickly as possible.
For all of your pictures, the procedure is pretty simple. Throughout the process try not to rub or handle the wet emulsion on the image of a photo, which will damage it. Start by gently rinsing each photo in a sink or bucket of cold, clear water.
Again, don’t try to rub off any dirt and change the water in the sink frequently. When you’re finishing cleaning, lay each one flat to dry on clean blotting paper – don’t use anything, such as newspaper, that might transfer ink to your photos. Keep them out of the sun to avoid curling.
If you can’t get to your pictures right away, try to rinse them and stack wet photos between wax paper in sealable plastic bags.
But the best advice is that you plan for an emergency by making copies of your most valuable photos ahead of time! But for a more complete picture on how to work with water damaged photos, and for tips on how to dry books and valuable papers, check out the article here!