Please do not post your only copy
This page argues against a service we do not sell, which is why it is worth reading. Plenty of restoration is done by post, some of it excellent, and the work is not the problem.
The problem is the envelope. A photograph in the post is insured, if at all, for the cost of replacing a piece of paper — and the entire reason you are having it mended is that it cannot be replaced.
What compensation actually covers
Postal compensation is calculated on the value of the item. For an ordinary print, that value is pence, and no level of cover changes the fact that a unique photograph has no market price to compensate.
Read the exclusions before you post anything: items of sentimental value, one-of-a-kind items and irreplaceable documents are commonly excluded outright from the higher levels of cover. The exclusion is not unreasonable — nobody can price your grandmother — but it does mean the insurance is not protecting the thing you care about.
The realistic outcome of a loss is an apology and a small payment, and no photograph.
The risk is small, and that is not the point
Most parcels arrive. The odds are good and the odds are irrelevant, because the loss is total and permanent when it happens, and it happens to somebody every week.
It is also two journeys rather than one. There and back, twice through sorting, twice through a van, and once through whatever happens at the studio's end during a busy December.
What to do instead
Scan it, and have the scan mended. A 600 dpi flatbed scan holds everything a paper print holds, and it can be copied, backed up and sent anywhere without risking the original.
No scanner is not an obstacle. A phone photograph taken in flat daylight is enough for most damage, and most public libraries have a flatbed scanner that costs nothing to use.
If the print genuinely needs physical treatment — flaking emulsion, mould in the surface, a photograph welded to its frame glass — then it does need to reach a conservator's bench. Take it in person if you possibly can, and ask what they propose to do before you leave it.
If you do post something
Post the scan, not the print, wherever the studio will accept one. Many will.
Where the object must travel, use a signed-for service with tracking, pack it flat between stiff board with the photograph in a paper enclosure, and photograph it yourself before it goes so that a record exists.
Never send an original as the only copy of anything. Scan it first, even badly. A poor scan of a photograph that then disappears is worth more than everything else on this page.
Questions
- Are you saying postal restoration services are bad?
- Not at all. Some of the best work in the country is done that way, and for an object that needs bench treatment there is no alternative. We are saying the print should not travel while a scan would do.
- Is a scan really as good as the print for this?
- For repairing damage in the picture, yes. A 600 dpi scan holds about as much detail as the paper does. What a scan cannot do is let anybody treat the object itself.
- What if my photograph is already damaged in the post?
- Scan it now, in whatever state it is in and in however many pieces. That fixes the number of copies at more than one, which is the only decision on this page that cannot be undone later.
Scan it, and try one for nothing
Send us the scan of the photograph you were about to put in an envelope. One mend, free, no card, and the print stays where it is.
Mend one photograph, freeIf it doesn't look like the person you remember, you don't pay.