How to preserve family photos for generations

1. Gather everything into one place

Family photos die of scatter, not of fire. They're split across old phones, WhatsApp groups, three relatives' hard drives and an album in someone's cupboard — and nobody knows who has what. Start by collecting: ask each branch of the family what they're holding, and get copies flowing to one person (you). If a lot of your family's photos live in a WhatsApp group, read do WhatsApp photos expire? first — those are the copies on a clock.

2. Scan the prints — oldest and most fragile first

• 600 DPI for photos you may want to reprint or enlarge; 300 DPI is fine for ordinary snapshots.
• Save as JPEG (or TIFF if you want maximum quality and don't mind big files). Stick to common formats — the file needs to open in forty years.
• Don't force photos out of old albums. If a print is glued down or brittle, photograph the album page with your phone in bright, even, indirect light instead. A good phone photo of a print beats a damaged original.
• Scan the backs too when there's writing on them — dates, names and places in a relative's handwriting are part of the record.

Prioritise ruthlessly: the oldest photos first, because they're usually the only copy in existence, and the people who can identify them are the oldest members of the family.

3. Back them up: the 3-2-1 rule

For anything irreplaceable, keep three copies, on two different kinds of storage, with one copy somewhere else. In practice: the files on your computer, a copy on an external drive, and a copy in a cloud service — or at another relative's house. A photo that exists in one place is one stolen laptop, one failed drive, one flood away from gone. This rule applies whatever apps or services you use, Kunbaa included: the safest archive is one with more than one home.

4. Name everyone — the step most families skip

Here's the uncomfortable truth about preservation: a perfectly scanned, perfectly backed-up photo of an unidentified man in 1962 is already lost. Within two generations, a photo without names becomes a photo of strangers — kept out of guilt, understood by no one.

So the most valuable hour in this whole guide is the one you spend with your oldest relatives, going through the photos while they can still tell you who's who. Record the conversation on your phone. Write down names, rough dates, places — and how each person is related to you, because "Ramesh Uncle" means nothing to your grandchildren without the connection. If you're doing this with a parent or grandparent far away, the guide to setting up an older relative pairs well with it.

5. Print a few

Paper has outlasted every file format ever invented. Print the twenty photos that matter most and put them in an album with names written beside them. It's the lowest-tech backup you'll make and, in a hundred years, quite possibly the only one still readable.

Where Kunbaa fits, if you want it to

Everything above works with no new apps at all. What we built Kunbaa for is step four — the naming — because folders and cloud drives have nowhere to put the answer to "who is she to us?". In Kunbaa you write the names, the place and roughly when into each photo's caption as you add it, and a real family tree records how everyone connects — so the scanned albums arrive with their answers, instead of as a folder called 2019_scans. The whole family can see it free, and one person pays for the space that holds the archive. But whether or not you ever use it: gather, scan, back up, and write the names down. Your grandchildren will thank the person who did.

Common questions