How safe are our albums really?

I've been reading up quite a bit lately about scrapbooking and doing it the "safe way", and I've read all the things that can potentially age our pictures. Well what I'm curious about is the fingerprints thing. I read that oils on your fingers and hands can be bad for your pictures, but does anyone actually wear rubber gloves when they scrap? I know I don't. So what I'm wondering, doesn't all the handling of the pictures to crop and paste(one way or another)damage our pictures in the long run? Does anyone else sit up at night thinking of such nagging petty things?

I use a "Googlies" cloth to wipe off the prints when I put them in the page prots. -- One lady at my LSS says that acid free is a bunch of bunk and will only add about 10-15 yrs. to your pics. -- I don't know....

Tracie

believe it or not- I have heard that some people actually DO scrap wearing cloth gloves. the thin kind that a film processor wears. haha

kinda makes you stop and think eh? Personally....I think that's a bit much.

Although I choose to scrap acid-free, I think that only a few things will really trash your pictures quickly: magnetic albums and dangerous adhesives like rubber cement. The rest of the archival safe stuff adds a negligible amount of time to the life-span of your pictures, IMHO. Sure if this stuff was museum bound, we could handle everything with kid gloves, keep them in a fireproof safe, test everything to make sure it was archivally safe, and blah blah blah blah blah. But who has time for that?

I use acid free paper, stickers, page protectors, etc., but I use computer journalling and some computer graphics -- even many of my pictures are duplicates that I have croped and enhanced then printed with my ink-jet printer. I know that what I'm doing may not last 250 years, but I feel that if it lasts beyond my childrens'generation and my offsprings' offspring want to preserve it further, by that time there will be an easy way -- it will probably all be electronic by 2200 anyway (I hope not though).
The one thing I do use is archival mist -- because I'm preserving my daughter's reviews, pictures, ads, etc. and I know how quickly newsprint can age.

there was a conversation like this on another board, and one lady said that archival-safe actually means using absolutely NO adhesive anywhere in the book! So I know that the scrapping we do isn't up to that standard. BUT at least we're not stuffing them in those awful magnetic albums (and look how long most of those pictures actually lasted--think how long ours will last in comparison!) AND I think that as scrapbookers we're more aware of journalling the memories that go along with the pictures, which is IMO the most important part, anyway. I know I"m not giving up my scrapping anytime soon no matter how much baloney someone says it is! lol

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Tabby

[This message has been edited by tabbyj1 (edited 04-23-2001).]

Some one said one time that a scrapbook is really made of paper and paper just *can't* last forever. What we are doing is already going to preserve it longer than normal. I am comfortable with that. I am also scanning all my LOs in (at a very high resolution) and burning CDs for them. That's my personal way of keeping back up copies. IMHO

To Addicted -- We recently bought a CD burner; I was planning on using it to save individual images I wanted to keep. I love your idea of saving layouts! Thanks bunches!