The Flood: A Photo Manager's Cautionary Tale

Do you know the old proverb, “A shoemaker’s children has no shoes.”  Unfortunately, this newsletter has a parallel message “The photo organizers family has no photos.”  OK, not that extreme, but prepare for a cautionary tale about the importance of backing up your photos.

Prologue

A few months ago I could not have felt more accomplished. I had just finished the monumental project of sorting through half a dozen cartons of photos and slides and about fifty albums from my mother’s house. Mom was the matriarch and keeper of generations of photos. Sadly she passed away last November.

I spent months reviewing pictures from the 1800s through the 2000s, and then carefully categorizing them by date, branch of family, people and events. Next, each photo was digitized (this is a key point readers!!!), and the digital photos were named and organized with the same information as the print copies. I backed up the digital photos on DropBox and also made an External Hard Drive for my family as well as for my two brothers. Finally, the print collection was stored in archival boxes, with labeled photo safe sleeves. So far readers, this is all excellent photo organizing protocol.

My big mistake came next. I was anxious to move the boxes out of my office so I could spread out for my next client project. I did not have an obvious spot on the main level of the house to store the boxes. We did however have a coffee table in our lower level den with a conveniently empty bottom shelf … and the boxes fit perfectly. Problem solved! Or so I thought…

The Flood

Flash forward to August 18, 2024. My husband and I were driving home from a lovely weekend in the Hamptons when I started getting flash flood warnings from our town on my phone. An hour later a neighbor called, letting us know that our driveway looked like the Colorado river. Another hour later a neighbor sent a video of the water level well up our garage doors and the cars in our driveway flooded. We couldn’t even get home that night because the only access to our street was under 2 feet of water.  I knew the lower level of our home would be soaked. During that sleepless Sunday night in a friend’s guest room my main thought was “Our pictures. Our pictures. I left them on the coffee table shelf.”

We returned home at the crack of dawn and the damage was even worse than we had anticipated. Most of the water had receded, but a thick layer of sludge coated everything within a foot of the floor. The next week was spent filling a 20 yard dumpster with ruined items, drying out the floor and walls, tearing out insulation, sheetrock, trim and carpet, fixing a flooded furnace, and trying to salvage whatever I could of our belongings, most importantly our family photos and kids' artwork and writing.

Although beautiful, it turns out archival boxes and archival plastic sleeves are not waterproof. The bottom three boxes of photos were filled to the brim with dirty water. The middle three boxes were wet but did not have standing water, and thankfully the photographs in the top three boxes were dry.

I spent countless hours trying to save the photos I could, first rinsing and separating each photo, then laying them flat to dry, and then pressing the dry curled photos in heavy books to try to flatten them.  Many photos could not be saved.

Lessons Learned

Three weeks later, I have the bandwidth to reflect back on this “once in a thousand year” flood, as the media called it. We were lucky. My client’s photos were stored in my office which is on an upper level. Our house can be repaired, the contents replaced, and even though some of my family’s print photos were curled or destroyed, every one of our photos was backed up digitally. Other local families were not as fortunate. Entire homes were destroyed. Three people in Connecticut died in flood water, including a man from our town.

I will leave you reader with some closing thoughts from my cautionary tale.

1. Do not store your photos where they can be damaged by water. Archival boxes are not waterproof, and plastic bins can leak.

2. Digitize your photos (and then back up the digital files)! Even if you lose the physical photo, you will at least have the digital image. I had digitized all of my family photos, but had not gotten to my kid’s artwork and writing, and many of these memories, which were stored in plastic portfolios and bins, were destroyed.

3. The timing of my disaster couldn’t be more fortuitous for you … September is Save Your Photos Month. Click here to access great resources for preserving and enjoying your photos. https://thephotomanagers.com/save-your-photos-month/