Transporting large amount of printed photos

[wyx087]

My mother plan to take large amount of printed family photos from China, including those photos in different sizes from 1960's or even earlier. My grandparents' property is to be rented out, so everything has to either shipped here or thrown away. I plan to convert everything to digital once it's here.

Question is, how to reliably transport a large amount of printed photos? There's about half bookshelf full of photos in their own albums.

My thinking is to remove the standard sized photos from albums and buy photo sleeves to reduce weight. But what about the earlier non-regular sized photos? Or is there a better method of transporting printed photos without damage them while reducing unnecessary weight?

Thanks

 

[RaglanSurf]

Personally I would live with the extra weight of the albums and then if you're scanning the original prints they will have been protected in their albums. Once you've got them here you can scan each in turn.

 

[ChrisR]

This is a tricky one, Wuyan. I can see that weight would make you want to remove the prints from the albums, but do consider some advantages that the album gives you. The first is protection, other advantages include context and sequence. There are very likely written cues in the albums about where or when the photos were taken, who is in them, etc. This contextual information is invaluable when digitising, and is surprisingly hard to reconstruct [EDIT: with loose prints or negatives]. Even envelopes of negatives (each representing one film) may not have much information about each image, but does increase the chance that some of the images will give clues that help you anchor the rest.

Is it possible to keep them in the albums but ship them by sea? Weight would then be less of an issue...

EDIT: typing the same time as Nick, same idea!

EDITed again for typos and clarification.

 

[RaglanSurf]

This is a tricky one, Wuyan. I can see that weight would make you want to remove the prints from the albums, but do consider some advantages that the album gives you. The first is protection, other advantages include context and sequence. There are very likely written cues in the albums about where r when the photos were taken, who is in them, etc. This contextual information is invaluable when digitising, and is surprisingly hard to reconstruct. Even envlopes of negatives (each representing one film) may not have much information about each image, but does increase the chance that some of the images will give clues that help you anchor the rest.

Is it possible to keep them in the albums but ship them by sea? Weight would then be less of an issue...

EDIT: typing the same time as Nick, same idea!

Your answer is far more detailed and eloquent than my hastily garbled reply.

 

[Asha]

my hastily garbled reply

Since when have you ever posted anything different?

To go back on topic, I agree to keep the photos intact in their relevant albulms if at all possible....Chris states some of the very good reasons to do so.

If it is cost of shipping the weight that poses the primary problem then I understand it has to be taken into consideration, however sometimes just paying out a bit more can pay off long term

 

[wyx087]

Thanks all for your valuable replies. I hadn't considered writings on the album. In this digital age, it's all in the metadata or folder names.

I shall suggest this to my mother, but not sure whether she wants the hassle of arranging additional sea shipping. She was planning to sort the photos then bring it all in checked luggage, may be 2 checked luggage and pay the airline for the extra one. This is actually cheaper than door-to-door shipping by sea for a box of similar size and weight (23kg). This method also feels more secure and safer.

Perhaps she can take phone photos of any writings on the albums before taking the photos out..........

 

[medwaygreen]

If it is half a bookshelf then box it into a tea chest and ship the chest by sea, get a shipper to do all the arrangements,much cheaper and will get to you in the condition it left China.

Your problem starts when you receive the tea cheat and you have to digitise the whole lot.

I am sure will will see a question about that.

 

[ChrisR]

Thanks all for your valuable replies. I hadn't considered writings on the album. In this digital age, it's all in the metadata or folder names.

I shall suggest this to my mother, but not sure whether she wants the hassle of arranging additional sea shipping. She was planning to sort the photos then bring it all in checked luggage, may be 2 checked luggage and pay the airline for the extra one. This is actually cheaper than door-to-door shipping by sea for a box of similar size and weight (23kg). This method also feels more secure and safer.

Perhaps she can take phone photos of any writings on the albums before taking the photos out..........

We don't know how many albums you are talking about here of course. However, we have somewhere above 20 albums of photos of our children at various ages. Taking a phone photo of each page would be a fairly massive undertaking on its own. Checking to make sure that faded writing, perhaps in blue ink on a dark background, remain readable in the image, is also likely to slip. Then at a later stage finding the phone image to match the print in hand to be digitised will also be difficult.

Basically, once the prints escape the album, the complexity of the digitising task is greatly increased! However, things like this are always compromises. But where person A makes choices about deconstructing and shipping, but person B has to deal with sorting, digitising and adding metadata to make the images usable, the decision-making may not be entirely rational, sadly. The danger to be wary of is that the choices made greatly increases the risk that the task is never completed. (It tends to be a bit tedious so there's a fairly substantial risk of non-completion, anyway.)

Anyway, I don't want to be too negative, just do the best you can and you might well enjoy some time with your mother sorting out selections of images that you can scan and make into wonderful photobooks of relevance to your family.

 

[Tori_T]

Bear in mind that 23kg of sorted photos in checked baggage may not arrive that way if security decide to have a root through the case(s) because the x-ray image isn't what they usually see.
If they're left in the albums, at least they'll stay in order.

You could end up not only having to scan them, but sending your Mother many many emails with photos attached, asking "Do you know/remember who/when/where/what this is?"

 

[wyx087]

Thanks again. I've noted all the concerns about removing photos from album to my mother. She is thinking if just a few kg overweight, she'll somehow remove a few album covers. Those hard covers are usually the heaviest part. If it's overweight by a lot, we'll have to look up tea chests