How to handle a brittle photograph
The short version
- Hold prints by two opposite edges, never by one corner.
- Never force a curl or a fold. A dry print cracks before it bends.
- No tape, no glue, no rubber bands, no paper clips.
- If it is already in pieces, keep the pieces — even the small ones.
Photographic paper dries out. The gelatin that carries the picture becomes stiff and then brittle, and a print that was flexible when it was put away will crack rather than bend when it is taken out thirty years later.
Almost every unrecoverable loss we see arrived in the fifteen seconds after somebody picked a photograph up. This page is about those fifteen seconds.
Picking one up
Two hands, two opposite edges, and let the print stay in whatever shape it is already in. A photograph lifted by one corner bends under its own weight, and a brittle one snaps along that bend.
Clean dry hands are fine for ordinary snapshots. Cotton gloves are useful for anything with a fragile surface, and unhelpful with anything slippery, because they cost you grip.
Curled prints, and the slow way to relax them
A curled print wants humidity, not force. Left in a room at ordinary humidity between two sheets of clean plain paper, under a book, most curls relax over a week or two.
Rolled prints — the school photograph, the regimental panorama — are the hard case. Do not unroll one that resists. It can be relaxed in a humidified container over several days, and if that sounds like more equipment than you have, a photograph scanned while still slightly curled is a far better outcome than a photograph cracked into three pieces.
The four things that cannot be undone
Sticky tape. It lifts the surface when it is removed, and it stains the paper brown from underneath over about a decade.
Glue, of any kind, including the glue on the back of a self-adhesive album page.
Rubber bands, which perish and weld themselves to the print, and paper clips, which crease it and rust.
Wiping. Whatever is on the surface — mold, dust, silvering — is best left there. A cloth grinds it in and takes emulsion with it.
Photographs that are already in pieces
Keep every fragment, including the ones too small to identify. Put them in a paper envelope, not a plastic bag, and write on the envelope rather than on anything inside it.
Do not attempt to reassemble the pieces with anything adhesive. Lay them out on the scanner instead: a scan is a reassembly that cannot damage anything.
Where to put them afterwards
Cool, dark, dry and stable, in that order of importance, and away from an outside wall. A cupboard in the middle of the house beats a loft and beats a basement by a wide margin.
Paper enclosures or plastic sleeves are both fine as long as the plastic is polyester, polypropylene or polyethylene. The one to avoid is PVC, which is the soft, faintly oily-smelling plastic of old album sleeves, and which will bond to a print given long enough.
If a photograph is already damaged, none of this makes it worse to scan it today. It is the handling before the scan that carries the risk, not the scan.
Last checked 2026-08-22