The most meaningful gift that you can give this holiday season might be hiding in a shoebox

One of the most thoughtful gift ideas is a custom photo album. You can create one through services like Artifact Uprising and Papier, which both offer a slew of different album layouts and designs. But what if your best photos were taken before the arrival of digital cameras?

Co. Design Senior Writer Elizabeth Segran had a perfect solution: Legacybox, which she recently used to revive and preserve precious family photos featuring her late father. She went to Legacybox with a literal box of decades worth of photographs—ones that had been tucked away because they were too fragile to handle—and entrusted their care to the service’s technicians. Legacybox specializes in taking analog prints, videos, audio, and slides, and transferring digitized versions via cloud, DVD, or flash drive.

While LegacyBox does not technically “restore” images, Elizabeth said she saw quality improvement in some of the photos she sent for processing. For example, one photograph from a dark Swiss church taken in the 1980’s suddenly appeared intricate and detailed in its digital form.

While shipping 750 priceless family photographs was daunting, the service takes a systematic approach to organizing submissions—barcodes label almost every asset in your tradeoff—and customers can follow along, step-by-step, as their photos are received, processed, and shipped back. The company is currently offering an unprecedented 60% off its services during its Black Friday event.

Once the digital versions were in Liz’s possession she turned to Artifact Uprising, which offers a wide variety of custom photo books, everything from leather-bound, heirloom-quality Layflat Photo Albums (from $289) to mini photo books (from $15).  The service relies on recycled, lustre satin finish Mohawk Paper to print its signature Lay Flat Albums, with the option to tap their Design Services to plot an organized, aesthetic layout for your collection. Elizabeth now owns two.

I used Artifact Uprising to preserve my Instagram photographs when I went off the platform a year ago. The Everyday Print Set is inexpensive and equally archive-worthy, on heavyweight, matte, or satin paper, cut into crisp bordered squares, perfect for framing or tacking on the wall on their own. I often use the prints as notecards and have a stack (mostly featuring my cat at various life stages) that have become a signature add-on to gifts and parcels.