How to label old family photographs before the names are lost

Nobody loses the photographs. What gets lost is who's in them. A box of prints can survive a house move, a loft clearance and three changes of address, and still be opened in forty years by someone who can't say whether the woman on the left is a great-aunt or a stranger who married in. The photo is fine. The only thing that was ever fragile was the one person's memory of it.

This site keeps turning up the same regret from people who've just lost a parent: a box of pictures nobody left alive can identify, or — worse — a parent who did write names on the back of every one, and a grown child who wishes now they'd asked about the people in them while there was still someone to ask. The labelling matters. The asking matters more, and it's the part that's actually running out of time.

How to write on a photograph without ruining it

Both the pencil-not-pen rule and "write small, near the edge, on the back" come from the same place: whatever's written has to be removable or at least not destructive, because you might be wrong, and because the mark shouldn't outlast its own usefulness. The Library of Congress's own preservation guidance is specific: write "on the back and near the edge with a soft graphite pencil" — not a ballpoint, not a marker, which can smear or bleed through to the front.

• Wash and dry your hands first. Icon, the UK's conservation body, starts here — natural oils from skin damage photographs, print surfaces most of all.
• Hold it by the edges. Not the image area. A thumbprint left today is still there in forty years.
• Pencil, not pen. Soft graphite, light pressure, near the edge of the back. Ink smears and can bleed through; pencil can be corrected if you get a name wrong.
• Where possible, label the sleeve instead of the print. The Library of Congress calls this "preferable" to marking the photograph itself — a name on the paper or plastic sleeve it's kept in does the same job with no risk to the original.
• Never use tape, glue, a sticky note or a paper clip directly on a photograph. All four are specifically warned against; adhesive and metal both cause damage that doesn't show up until years later.

Keeping the box itself in good order

Labelling is wasted effort if the photographs themselves are fading or stuck together by the time anyone reads the names. Icon's advice here is plain: keep photographs somewhere cool, dry and dark — an inside cupboard in a bedroom, not a loft, a cellar, or a cupboard against an outside wall or near water pipes, since those swing in temperature and damp with the weather. Keep light exposure to a minimum generally, and away from direct or strong light especially — colour prints fade fastest of all.

The part that actually can't wait

A name on the back of a photograph answers one question: who is this. It doesn't answer the ones that actually make a photograph worth keeping — what was happening, why everyone's dressed like that, whether the two people at the edge of the frame liked each other. Those answers exist in exactly one place: the living memory of whoever's left who was there, or who was told. Writing a name down buys you an identification. Asking the question behind it buys you the story, and only one of those two expires.

• Go through the box together, not alone. Sorting it yourself and asking later means showing someone a stack of unlabelled faces from memory, out of context, which is far harder than pointing at the actual print and asking "who's this, and what's going on here?"
• Ask about the photo, not about them. "Who's this?" is a specific, answerable question. "Tell me about your childhood" in front of the same box gets a shrug; a face in a photograph gives someone something concrete to react to.
• Write down what they say next to the name, not just the name. "Auntie Joan" is an identification. "Auntie Joan, who everyone said I looked like, at her sister's wedding the year before she emigrated" is the thing that was actually at risk of being lost.
• Photograph the back as well as the front once it's labelled. A pencilled name can smudge or fade over decades too; a digital copy of both sides is the backup for the backup.

This is the same reason StoryPrompt exists for the rest of a parent or grandparent's story, not just the photographs: it emails one specific question a week for a year, they answer in writing, and every answer collects into a book — so the things that would otherwise only come up while going through a shoebox get asked anyway, on a schedule, while there's still someone to ask.