Your parents' wedding photos, at your wedding

Somewhere in your parents' house there is an album, or a shoebox, with forty photographs of a wedding from thirty or forty years ago. Most couples think of it in the month before their own, want to do something with it, and run out of time. This is the something, and it fits in one afternoon.

Three parts. Getting the photographs off paper before the paper gets worse, which is the part with a deadline. Putting them where guests will see them on the day, which is the part people enjoy. And a small argument for why the photographs of your own wedding, both sets, should end up in the same place as theirs.

Scan the album first, and do it properly

Colour prints from the seventies and eighties are fading now. The cyan dye goes first, so the whole thing drifts towards red and orange, and a print that looked fine ten years ago is visibly worse today. Scanning does not stop that, but it makes a copy that will not get worse, and the afternoon you spend on it is the last afternoon it will ever need.

Use a flatbed scanner if anyone in the family has one, at 600 dots per inch for a standard print, saved as a TIFF or the highest quality JPEG. Wipe the glass. Take the prints out of the album sleeves, because plastic sleeves add a haze and album pages are never flat. Forty prints is about ninety minutes at a steady pace.

If there is no scanner, a phone works for most people and the result is better than nothing by a long way. Lay the print flat on a matt surface, in daylight but out of direct sun, hold the phone parallel to it, and use one of the scanning apps that straighten and de-glare rather than the camera. Turn the flash off. Shoot every print twice and keep the better one.

• Write down who is in each photograph while a parent is in the room. Names, the place, roughly when. Put the notes in a text file with the same numbers as the scans. This is the step everybody skips and the one that matters most in twenty years.
• Keep the prints. Scanning is a copy, not a replacement, and the originals are still the best version if anybody ever wants a professional restoration.
• Back the scans up the same evening, to a second drive or a cloud account. A folder of scans that lives on one laptop is one spilled coffee from being the shoebox again.

Showing your parents' wedding photos at your wedding

The simplest version is the one that works best: a few prints, framed or on a small easel, on a table near the entrance or beside the guest book. Both sets of parents, and the grandparents if there are photographs. Guests stop, look, and go and find the people in them, and the conversation it starts is worth more than any other decoration you will pay for.

Some notes from having watched this work and not work. Keep it to six or eight photographs, not the whole album. Print them at the same size so they read as a set. Put a small card with the names and the year beside each, because half your guests will not recognise a twenty-five-year-old version of your mother. And place the table where people wait, not where they walk past: by the bar during the reception, by the entrance during the drinks after the ceremony.

Then photograph the table yourself before guests arrive, because it will be moved, drinks will be put on it, and by the end of the night the frames will be at angles. That photograph, and the ones your guests take of each other looking at it, are part of the day's record. Where the QR card goes has a suggestion: this table is one of the places people stand still with a phone in their hand.

The gallery version, if you are using one

If you are collecting guest photographs into a shared gallery, add a dozen of the scans to it before the wedding. Guests who scan the card during the drinks see your parents' wedding before they see any of yours, and it sets the tone for what the gallery is for. It also puts the scans somewhere every relative can download them, which is the question your aunt was going to ask anyway.

One caution. Use the good scans, not phone photographs of the album pages, because at card size a hazy scan next to a sharp guest photograph looks like a mistake. And add them as their own small group at the start, not scattered through the night's photographs. How the gallery works for guests is the short version of what they will see.

Why your own two sets should live next to theirs

Your parents have one set of photographs from their wedding, forty frames, because that is what a photographer with film delivered and nobody else was holding a camera. You will have two. The professional set of several hundred, and the guest set of several hundred more, taken by everybody who was there, of everything the photographer walked past.

In thirty years your children will do this afternoon in reverse, with your photographs. Make it easy for them. One folder, both sets, the scans of your parents' album in it too, names written down, backed up twice. What to do with wedding photos after the wedding is the full sequence, and how to back them up is the step that turns a shoebox into an archive.

The album your parents have survived because paper is patient. Files are not. The afternoon you spend scanning theirs is a good afternoon to set up the folder that yours will live in, because the person who does one usually does the other, and the person who does neither has a shoebox.