Heritage albums: a family archive, printed and bound
A box of old family photographs turned into a book with an order to it. Sorting, scanning, restoration where it is needed, then sequenced and printed to outlast the technology it arrived on.
Heritage albums from £230.00, scanning and restoration quoted separately
Any condition, any format
Prints, negatives, slides, glass plates, old scans. Damaged material is assessed honestly before you commit.
Captions and dates
Names, places and years set into the layout, so the album still makes sense in fifty years.
Copies for the family
Designed once, printed as many times as you need, in whichever binding suits each recipient.
Almost every family has one: a box, a biscuit tin, a carrier bag at the back of a wardrobe. Nobody knows quite what is in it, and nobody wants to be the one who throws it away.
A box in a cupboard is not preservation, it is postponement. The point of a heritage album is that the photographs get seen: sorted, dated where possible, captioned with the names while somebody still knows them, and bound into a book that sits on a shelf and gets opened at Christmas.
What I need from you
Less than you fear. Bring me what you have in whatever state it is in: prints, negatives, slides, phone photographs of prints, scans a relative made years ago. Mixed sources sit together perfectly well in a finished book, and the mixture is often part of the story.
The most useful thing you can do first is write down what you know. Names, places, approximate years, who is related to whom. Not on the back of the print: a separate sheet or a note on your phone keyed to a rough group. The photographs will outlast the memory of who is in them, and once that knowledge is gone it does not come back.
Scanning and repair
Phone snaps of prints are fine for identification and useless for printing. Anything that matters wants scanning at a resolution that leaves room to work, and negatives hold far more information than the prints made from them ever did. I scan, or work from your scans, and repair fading, tears and creases as part of the same job.
Sequencing a hundred years
A heritage album is not a chronological dump. It works in chapters: a household, a decade, a place, a working life. Gaps are workable too. A marriage with two surviving photographs and a strong decade after it still makes a book; it just becomes a book about the decade, with the wedding as its opening note.
Captions matter more here than in any other album. A face without a name is decoration; a face with a name is family.
One copy each
Heritage albums are the ones most often ordered in multiples, because there are usually four siblings and one box. Further copies cost less than the first, since the design is already done; a soft back edition is the most economical way to give everyone one.
Albums I would suggest
Further reading
Tell me what you have, and what you would like made
Send me the photographs and a sentence about the occasion. I will come back with a recommendation and a price, with no obligation.