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Old 01-18-2009, 02:16 PM
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sarahorton sarahorton is offline
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I agree with Lynn. If you are going to go to the trouble of scanning your pages, you'll want to borrow or purchase a good photo scanner. They are fairly inexpensive these days - under $200.

Scanners are basically big digital cameras. There is really no difference between photographing your pages or scanning them as far as the archivability is concerned. One pass with the scanner is certainly no more damaging than setting your pages out in the sunshine and photographing them or setting off a bright flash to get the photo. Remember that a flash (and studio lights) release a huge amount of broad-spectrum light onto a concentrated area very quickly. Scanners release a narrower spectrum of light - a few watts of energy at best.

Light does damage photos, but it is cumulative and relatively slow. It generally occurs over a long period of exposure. UV light is the most dangerous, so if you hang a photo on your wall near a window you'll see degradation pretty quickly. Keeping your albums in dark, controlled storage areas will give you the greatest degree of (light) archivability. (Of course other things affect this as well, like acidity, etc.)

I wouldn't be too concerned about the adhesives melting - today's scanners are not hot and a few watts of light can't melt the adhesive.

That said, you wouldn't want to scan your photos hundreds of times, passing the light over them again and again and again. You wouldn't want to Xerox several hundred copies of them because you'd be passing the light over them hundreds of times. Theoretically, that could cause some damage. But if you are just scanning them once (or twice if you mess up on the first scan) it's certainly no worse than taking the photo out of the album and looking at it for a while by a window.
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