Coins Falling Out Of Folder. Which Brand Is Best?

I store my 2nd and 3rd string coins in the blue Whitman folders and like you have some problem slots/holes. I just take a snippet of paper and lay it over and beyond the hole, then press coin in. Seems to hold fine when closing up the folder.

That is an age old problem with the blue Whitman folders going as far back as I can remember. This is one reason we still see old cent coins with tape residue on them.

Now I keep my coins in Dansco albums. the pages have a clear plastic sheet that keeps the coins contained. There are other brands other than Dansco that folks here use (Whitman Albums) is one of them.

I finally gave up on the folders. I had some of the books with the clear plastic slide-in covers but didn't like them much better.

I ended up putting all my collections in 2x2's and marking them off in the space in the folder they would have gone into. (Book # & page #)

I like Dansco albums also. They are a nice look and the albums don't fall apart. Many of my old Whitman albums have the binding broken, but they still hold the coins. The only downside to Dansco albums is they don't have the finger indentation to remove the slides easily.

I've long since moved on from Whitman folders to self-adhesive 2X2 holders, which go into loose-leaf 2X2 pages housed in a binder.

Open my binder, and you'll see the obverse-side 2x2s on the right page, and a page at left with descriptions of the coins. Some H.E. Harris USA stamp albums have this arrangement, and I find that it works very nicely for homebrew coin and currency albums, too.

This question hasn't been directly addressed yet. The usual explanation for the coins no longer fitting in the hole is wear and tear from having coins pushed in and out of them all the time, but the coins can loosen from other causes too.

These Littleton and Whitman albums are made of, essentially, cardboard. Cardboard can "weaken over time" if it starts to decompose, but I'm going to assume your albums haven't gotten all mouldy yet. But what cardboard can do over time is absorb moisture, in humid air. Above 70% humidity, cardboard can start to swell up from absorbed moisture. And for a piece of cardboard with holes punched into it, if the cardboard swells up, then the holes will get just slightly larger. Since the only thing holding the coins in place is friction from a tight fit (but not too tight otherwise the coins are too tough to remove), a slightly larger hole will cause the coins to loosen enough to fall out.

Humidity high enough to make the cardboard do this is probably also not going to be very good for the coins themselves, in terms of long term storage.