Water-damaged, mouldy or stuck-together photos: what to do first

A box from the cellar after a burst pipe. A roof that leaked all winter onto the suitcase in the attic. Or the simplest version: an album that spent twenty years in a damp room, and when you open it the photographs have become one solid block. The first instinct is almost always the wrong one, which is to start pulling.

The short answer

Water is not the enemy. Drying badly is. A wet photograph is still rescuable; a photograph that has dried stuck to another photograph has often lost its surface for good. So the order is: keep them wet or freeze them, separate them in water, dry them flat and apart, and only then make a copy and repair that.

Two things to accept before you start. Some photographs will not survive, and the ones that matter most deserve a professional rather than a brave amateur. A conservator costs money; a second attempt does not exist.

Step 1: sort by what you are actually holding

• Still wet. The best case. You have about 48 hours before mould begins.
• Damp but separate. Dry them now, before they find each other.
• Dry and stuck together. The hard case. Water can still help, but the odds drop.
• Mouldy. Deal with the moisture first; mould is a symptom.
• Stuck to glass. A category of its own, see below.

Step 2: wet photographs

• Rinse each print gently in a tray of clean, cold water to carry off mud and grit. Do not rub. Grit under a finger scratches the emulsion in one stroke.
• Lay them face up on paper towel, newspaper or a clean screen, not touching. The emulsion side is the soft side and it sticks to everything while wet.
• Air only. No hairdryer, no radiator, no sun. Heat curls prints and can cook the emulsion.
• Do not press them flat while drying. Curling is normal; you can flatten them later under weight, between clean sheets, once they are bone dry.
• No time? Bag them with a little water and freeze. This is the single most useful thing most people do not know.

Work in batches you can actually finish. Twenty prints drying properly beats two hundred drying in a heap.

Step 3: prints stuck together

Put the block in a tray of clean cold water and leave it. Most prints loosen on their own somewhere between ten minutes and an hour, and you will see the edges begin to lift. Ease them apart only where they are already separating, and only with your fingers or a blunt plastic edge.

If a print does not move after a long soak, stop there. That is the point where the emulsion has bonded, and more force removes the image rather than the neighbour. A conservator has solvents and patience that you do not.

Step 4: mould

Mould on a damp print is the worst moment to intervene: wiping grinds the spores into the gelatine and turns a surface problem into a permanent one. Dry the photograph first, in moving air, away from the rest of the collection. Once it is dry the mould becomes powdery and will lift off with a soft brush.

Do that outdoors or at an open window, wear a mask, and do not use water, vinegar, alcohol or any household cleaner on the print. Keep mouldy items away from healthy ones until they are dry and brushed; spores travel.

Step 5: stuck to the glass of a frame

Common with photographs framed decades ago in a humid house. Do not try to peel it. Two things work often enough to be worth trying:

• Soak it. Put the glass with the print face down in cold water and wait. The print usually floats free, and you continue as in step 2.
• Freeze it. An hour in the freezer sometimes shrinks glass and emulsion at different rates, and a very thin blade can then be worked into a corner. Slowly, and stop at resistance.

If neither works: leave it in the frame and photograph it through the glass, straight on, with daylight from the side and no flash. A good copy of a stuck photograph is worth more than a destroyed original.

Step 6: when to hand it over

Call a conservator for anything irreplaceable, anything already torn or flaking, anything on glass or metal rather than paper, and anything where a first attempt has already gone wrong. Old photographic processes, in particular, do not behave like a modern print in water.

Step 7: now the copy

Once the print is dry, the physical work is finished and the digital work begins, and this part is reversible. Scan at 600 dpi or more, or photograph the print flat in daylight. Keep that untouched scan as your master.

Water leaves its own signature: pale tide lines, a colour cast that is usually pink or yellow, patches where the surface lifted. Those are exactly the things an automatic repair handles well, because it is rebuilding tone and colour rather than inventing a face.

You can do it in one step on thememorypalace.ai/restore: one photograph, free, no account, and it colourises the print as well if it was black and white. The result carries the label "Restored and coloured with AI", and that matters here more than usual. A water stain removed is a stain removed; a colour guessed is a guess. If anyone in the family still knows what colour that dress was, write it down next to the file.

For the damage that has nothing to do with water, see how to fix a faded, scratched or torn photo. For the scanning itself, scan, photograph or outsource.

Afterwards: do not put them back

Whatever came out of a cellar or an attic should not go back into one. Dry, dark, stable temperature, and off the floor. Store prints in paper or polyester sleeves rather than PVC, which softens and sticks over time. And the scan you just made is your real insurance: a flood takes the box, not the copy.