I hope this is the correct forum for a storage question.

I need to find a place either in the real world or online where one can purchase acid-free photo albums that have the right size and shape pockets for those old 3x3 pictures.

I have a ton of them that I found in the house after my mother passed away last year. She had stuffed most of them unceremoniously into a old shopping bag, and some of them are quite banged up. There has to be a way to preserve them better from now on. Right now I only have them stuck into some 4x6 pockets or in those horrible "sticky" albums, neither of which I consider a satisfactory solution.

Of course I have one or two albums from the early 1970s that are the right size, but they already have pictures in them (of me and of my sister, as children).

I'm also curious when these 3x3 pictures stopped being the default size. I remember them from my childhood but sometime during the 1980s when I was a teenager, they seem to have disappeared.

Thanks.

After doing some internet searchs, I found this as a possible resource --
http://www.archivalusa.com/3312v25.html

My parents took a lot of those small photos also -- when I was a kid, they had them in albums with the photo corners (the store above sells those also) -- I never liked the photo corners, but they are a solution for odd-sized prints. I'm just keeping them in photo storage boxes until I can face the job of actually putting them in albums. I have digitized most of the ones that I have, but need to work on the ones that my brother kept after our parents died.

Also try:

Kolo.com < They have some cool stuff including these cool little photo albums I bought as gifts for clients. They are about 2"x2". They have a great online catalog but some retailers sell the product including Pearl art supplies.

This website probably has just about anything you could ever ask for archival and I have been using them for years.
http://www.archivalmethods.com/index.cfm?

Hope this helps.

Chris

Thanks to everyone, all of your advice was extremely useful. ArchivalUSA seems the most useful so far.

Additionally, there seem to be some mom & pop stores downtown that I can try later. The more choices, the better.

Hello

Another great site is:

http://www.lightimpressionsdirect.com/servlet/OnlineShopping

Ciao

John

Fantastic! I was going to start a thread and ask something along these very same lines. My parent's photos are in a mess. They used to be in neat albums, but over the years they've gotten pulled out, piled up, boxed up, etc. At Christmas, while I was down, I sorted them all back into a semblance of chronological order. But since the ones I was dealing with cover a span of 40 years, there's every shape imaginable, from 2x3 (the very early polaroids), 3x3, 3.5x3.5, 3x5, 4x6, 5x7, and some others, even. Seperately sized pages in 3 ring binders are perfect! Unfortunately, I pulled most of these pics out of those "nifty" sticky/magnetic albums, which DOD (Dear Old Dad) thinks are fine. Convincing him to spend money on new album pages is going to be a hard sell. Especially considering I counted 2000 photos just for those 40 years. That doesn't even count the pics from before my parents married. I guess we'll buy a pack of pages a month until we get them all stored away. May be that the great-grandkids will be finishing this project. Thanks All!