Ida, I wish I could be of help. I am in the same boat as you so I will be following this thread closely.

Did this thread get moved? I posted a reply, got an error message that it couldn't be posted, then poof, I couldn't find the thread...until now. I have to go out now and will repost later.

Yes, I'm sorry Linelle! I thought it would get a bit more traffic over here, even though it's OT, and I'd hoped to pull it before anyone responded.

IdaClaire, I had some older photos restored and duplicated years ago at Fort Worth Photo Lab. I have no idea if they are still the same people, but I was very pleased and I don't think it was horribly expensive...not cheap, but worth it for the few heirloom photos that I wanted to keep. It might be worth taking the album into the shop intact as they may have ideas about how best to remove the photos as well as restoration.

My husband scanned a very large number of old family photos. A decent-quality scanner can auto-correct, or custom settings correct, many of the condition problems. Some were in very, very poor condition. Not just the spots as shown on yours, but large lines across the faces, blotches, completely red coloration, and so dark that you could hardly make out the subject matter on the original. Many of the transformations were amazing! He purchased an Epson Perfection V600 Photo scanner ($200ish) specifically for the task, after researching the reviews. It does negatives, too. Or maybe someone you know has a similar scanner that can do them for you, if you do not have a large number of photos.

For restoration of the originals, I would go to a pro. Don't be in a hurry to cut them out of the album. Restorers have dealt with this problem many times and may have better methods and techniques. I recommend asking them, first. (ETA: Got interrupted mid-typing for longer than expected and see this has been recommended already.)

Those magnetic pages were the worst thing ever invented. I've seen several methods recommended on genealogy sites. One is to use dental floss to "saw" them off.

Agree with gyr_falcon. We have a specialty photo shop in town (they sell cameras and equipment primarily) that also will send out old photos to be restored, copied, etc. They can do wonders with photos in worse condition than yours. I don't recall it being terribly expensive. I'm sure if you take a number of your photos in they could probably give you a price on making a disk for you. You could then make as many copies of the disk you wanted for family members. Or just pay them for the number of copies you need if it isn't prohibitive.

A photo book is also a great idea since most people wouldn't take the time to do anything with the storage media except stick it in a cabinet.

IdaClaire, such interesting photos. I'm glad to hear you're preserving them. I've scanned a lot of photos, some very old, negatives, slides and tin types. Plus all of our family photos taken over the years. Boxes and boxes, most not yet scanned. I had to ser that project aside for a while, but found it very rewarding. I just had a simple HP flatbed scanner and Photoshop. For people doing a lot of scans, there is equipment that will do batches and much faster.

with Photoshop, I could crop, adjust the hue, contrast, saturation and remove or fix some of the artifacts (like your dots).

Mold can create "foxing" and many album materials like plastic can leave marks, encourage mold, cause the photos to adhere to the plastic. Cellophane tape leaves brown marks. Inks can flow and transfer to other photos and leak to the image. Nowadays there are special archival quality materials that are kind, but in years past, these were not likely to be (readily) available.

You might want to look into a preservationist as well as a scanning service, especially for any photos that are rare.

The third photo down looks like a "Rough Rider". My grandfather was a Rough Rider, joining when he was 16 yo (fibbed to join). I have a bunch of photo from that era -- some showing all the tents where they trained (Florida). The men wore various types of "uniforms" -- apparently cobbled together from former campaigns.

The uniform on the last chap does look like it belongs in a marching band; or possibly a conductor or circus performer. You might want to run that past an historian, or theatre production person. Someone at your towns historical society might be a good resource.

When I was scanning a lot of old black and white family prints from those little booklets the photo shop used to put the 120 prints in, I got a huge kick out of enlarging them on my display screen. A regular wool skirt came alive with memories when I zoomed on it. I could see the flecks of colored wool dots amid the charcoal and found that I could remember that skirt of my mothers in detail and with that came a flood of memories and associations I was not informed of by just viewing the 3x3 inch gray toned glossy print.

Now I want to post some of my photos and ask questions! So interesting.

I have all my family's slides, the stuff in carousels that we watched on a screen in the living room at night with all the lights off. And that was the only time they ever got seen. So I scanned all the good ones myself at home with a transparency scanner. I had some major color corrections to do as some of the film from the early 60s had gone south.

I'm not sure what a scanning service charges, but scanners don't cost much anymore and it's a fun project, if you're into that sort of thing. Before I started, I projected everything on the wall so I could eliminate everything that was poorly shot or didn't have any people in it. [Note to self: It doesn't mean much down the road if there aren't any people in the shots.]

I used Photoshop to remove stuff like the spots on the faces in your photos. It's fairly easy. Less is more. You don't want it to look photoshopped, but like a restored photo that retains its character. Photoshop is expensive, but there are lots of free and low-cost apps out there that will do the job just as well.

If you scan, do it at as high a resolution as you can, esp. if the photo is small. The more pixels the better. You may want to enlarge something and print it. You'll be glad for the higher resolution.

Good luck, and have fun.

Here's the man in the second photo with just the spots on his face removed. It took me two minutes. There's still the fading on his hair at the top and that takes a little more work, but doesn't he look better now?

ETA: Oops, missed the spots in front and on top of his left ear.

Thanks all, so much, for the very helpful information and suggestions! Now that I think about it, my dad has a scanner and Photoshop on his computer, so maybe I can enlist his help with this little project. I didn't realize it could be as simple as Photoshopping out the imperfections on the scans, but of course that makes perfect sense, and Linelle - as you have illustrated by removing great-great-grandpa's "spots", it works! Thanks so much for showing me that!

The young man that Petalique says looks like a Rough Rider was my great-grandfather, Sam. (I love the very obviously faux background in that photo!) I have another photo of him in uniform and he's holding a gun, but it has a bad line right down the middle of his body. Would be wonderful if a restorer could do something about that. In that photo, especially, I can tell that Sam had dark, brooding good looks and I wonder what he and my great-grandmother must've been like as young people. I knew my great-grandmother, as she lived to a very old age and passed when I was a young teenager, but of course to me she was always a frail, old woman. I get a little thrill just imagining her and Sam together as sweethearts. Sadly, Sam died young by drowning, and my great-grandmother was terrified of water for the rest of her life following that tragedy. She never remarried.

I'm still researching that uniform on g-g-g-grandfather. It's a puzzler for sure!

Great suggestions, Linelle.

My HP scanner is old and not high resolution. I have to get a privately written driver for in (online). It did come with a transparency scanner. I too have many transparencies. A lot of the colors were weird and needed adjusting. Some of the ocean/bay/water ones very very blue-green, but I managed to make them look good. It's mostly fun, but some of the repairs are so laborious for this self taught hack.

Funny too that back in the 50s until 1970s, people often took pics of their kids naked in tubs and pools or at the beach. The local photo shops would print these, no problem. Around the late 1980s or so there was this big brouhaha in Cambridge, MA when a woman went to pick up family photos for an art project she was doing. IIRC the people at the shop, on seeing that there were a few nude pics of her young children called the police. I suspect that there were interviews with Child Services as well as a lot of public opinion registered.

I have old family pics that I want to give to my siblings, but, because of the times we live in, will only deliver some of them personally -- definitely not mail them.

ETA -- nice cleanup on the grandfather's portrait, Linelle.

My slides go back to the early 50s. The color is still good from that era. But the film from the early 60s really degraded and the slides appear as if being viewed through tomato juice. I couldn't return them to their former full spectrum color, but I got rid of the orangey red.

I love projects like this. Plus, it's communing with the past and preserving it for the future.

I love genealogy and old photos! Could the last photo that you thought might be a band uniform been a cadet military uniform....or maybe military band? What year would this have been? Could it be civil war era?

Go to this link... scroll down a few posts... a poster included a photo of a 1872 band uniform.. it has similarities! http://civilwartalk.com/threads/help-identifying-a-uniform-find.98237/

If you really want to get into it and he truly understands Photoshop, get your dad a copy of Katrin Eismann's book on restoring old photos with photoshop, although it's rather technical. But that's the bible on doing restoration work.

Here's an example from a Photoshop Elements book by a different author, not even with all the resources of full photoshop. It's very time consuming to do this kind of work, though:

You could try removing them from the album with this stuff: Undu It says it's photo safe.