Photo stuck to (frame) glass

Nail Polish remover should do the trick. Pound has has it in a link bottle.

Failing that, or if you don’t want to get some. a stanly blade, and scrap it off trh way you would paint off glass.

A bit of a random one, but if you have any break fluid in your garage/shed, or just dip a wrag in your cars resoviour.thats meant to be really good at distroying car paint work so that may be worth a shot. It’s free, and may delve the elbow work of scraping it off.

If the glass is actully perspex, non of my above methods shold be tried.

My personal favourite for removing things put on with ‘sticky’ materials is Goo Gone. It smells pleasantly of oranges and is very mild in its actions. Unfortunately at £5/bottle it is now a little expensive in the UK as it suffers from the usual £1=$1 rip-off.

Assuming that you do get the remains off of the glass, remember that images should always have a art card or art paper matt frame with the matt between the image and the glass. The matt is there to give it an image a frame, but more importantly to prevent the glass and the paper coming into contact in future. Otherwise you need a more complex, (i.e. expensive) frame that mounts the glass with an enforced separation.

johnbarry wrote:

Yes I have an ice scraper, blow me down that did work. It left a faint black scar, but that soon went with a sponge scourer. Problem solved

Have to report having the same potential problem JB: I am currently restoring my chimney breast surfaces after the fireplace was removed. Apart from TV and audio stuff, this meant removing a large black & white Elvis photo from the ’68 Comeback Special, the King dressed in a leather jacket. I am a bit concerned about taking this out of the frame atm, after reading what happened to you, because it was a pressie from my daughter. It has never fitted the all-glass frame properly: I think that a warning should be put on these frames about photos sticking to glass after some years.

I must admit that the glass sticking to photographs was something that I was warned about many years ago. I came into photography as the old papers were going out of fashion and new resin coated stock was coming in. The old ones used to be glazed by applying them to a heated polished roller as I recall with dire warnings about making sure that the drum was highly polished and totally clean. That was something that I never dabbled with, I arrived as that era was slowly closing and the resin coated papers came in. They were high gloss which made very smooth surfaces which allowed for little chance of air voids, unless they were created by the matt spacing the image from the glass. The issue also arose with printed images, e.g. posters or cuttings from magazines where the very smooth surface of the image would not only easily contact the glass, its surface also appeared to possess the ability to absorb just enough dampness or other stuff from the air to form a bond better than contact adhesive: I cannot now remember the ways that were suggested for recovering cherished images that became stuck, it did depend, then as now on how heavy the image material was. If it was lightweight then ‘don’t touch’ was the order of the day; for heavy weight photo-paper a very thin very sharp razor type blade could, with skill be used to ease the two materials apart. However, the ‘don’t let it happen in the first place’ was probably the only real solution. Once they are stuck, you are in effect stuck, so live with it though a mega expensive expert might be able to help, though perhaps not.

If the photos are > 30 years old then you will almost certainly want to colour correct the blues and greens before archiving. It can be a long painstaking job. Photoshop and Corel Paintshop Pro have plug-ins to ease the pain. Tbh I do not know a cheap/free way of doing it.