Preserving old photos

[marlene]

I've been going through hundreds (if not thousands) of old family photos. Some are almost 100 years old.

They are in various states of disrepair, and I don't want them to get any worse. Right now they are in manila envelopes, Fedex envelopes, file folders, etc.

I don't know anything about archival materials, but I need find some way of organizing and storing the photos so they don't deteriorate any further.

Is there such a thing as clear pages (with pockets for individual photos) that would fit in a three-ring binder? In many cases I want to be able to see the backs of the photos, which sometimes have information about the photo (some of it's in Russian, but maybe someday I can get it translated).

Or are clear pages not a good thing for storing old photos?

I'm scanning some of them, but it's unlikely that I'll be able to scan all of them -- there are just way too many. So I would like to be able to store the in a way that I can look at them without having to handle them.

mxh