There must be countless millions (if not billions) of slides, negatives and prints in existence all over world stored in old boxes, photo albums stored away in the attic or cupboards gathering dust.
This is a great shame as often these are hardly ever looked at because of the inconvenience of setting up projectors and screens or finding the right photo album.
The danger is that these old negatives, slides and prints will gradually deteriorate or fade and treasured memories may well be lost. Ok, so what are the advantages of scanning these old pictures anyway? I will endeavour to make a case for this.
Deterioration
1. Depending on the process and paper, most photographic prints will fade badly with time. Colour prints lose their sparkle and intensity and can be particularly badly affected.
2. Negatives and slides can fade, get scratched and worse still emulsion surfaces can get attacked by fungus which can ultimately destroy them altogether.
3. Black and white prints are less affected than colour prints but never-the less most will still fade.
4. Old Polaroid prints are one of the worst culprits. Some of these can fade very badly indeed.