Are 99.9% of Your Photographs Just Not Important Enough To Save?

If I could nip back in time I would tell myself NEVER bin your negatives! (& do not get married, but at least that error was fixable:) Some negatives + prints were discarded due to being landscapes, dull (Although being on 110 film, they wern’t exactly taking up much space!) But others were of me & friends from years ago, some underexposed; I assumed I’d never see these people again, and I also never imagined being old and nostalgic for my own history. Pre-AuADHD diagnosis I didn’t twig that those images were my replacement for a glitched memory. Fast forward a few years, home scanners that can wring detail from sub-par negatives, and ‘social media’ are invented! Being able to re-connect with past lives and share photos online, suddenly those old, unique images are relevant again and much wanted. I’d been lucky enough to have a snap-camera when most didn’t carry them, to capture those moments. Then threw them away. It’s some consolation to know I didn’t lose all of them, and that I’m not alone in making this mistake; it’s surprisingly more common than I’d thought-! But I feel bad for anyone who loses their photos, whether thru’ accidents or their own mistake – So my advice, learnt the hard way as usual, is do not get rid of your negatives! – If they get binned after you die, fair enough. But while you’re still on this material plane, you just might want them back some day..

Did anyone succeed with the family site idea for digitial sharing, and if so, how and where is it hosted? I realize that among my tens of thousands of images are many that are really for other people, not for me. Creating a family site would be perfect, and then I could send the subjects their own negatives!

This article was extremely helpful. I am just starting to scan thousands of photos from years ago, some of them before color was a thing. I’ve been struggling with what to do with them after I scan them for all the reasons you mentioned. I want to declutter, but I fear I’ll lose something very important and precious in tossing them. I’m still struggling even as I write this, but I like knowing that I’m not alone and that all of my back and forth was so well articulated by your article. Even the comments section is helping me decide my next steps as it appears that so many others are having the same internal debate and some even have a firm stance. All of these comments are helping me decide what I should do next. Thank you.

My decision, toss some, keep some

Regarding old photos and their associated negatives, do I really want to keep the hundreds of photos I took of museum displays, aquarium animals, and botanical gardens? It all looks the same after a while. I took so many as a youngster then teen and young adult, until a well-travelled friend told me to just buy the souvenir book filled with photos from the shop at the end of every tour. Those guide book photos are much better, have higher clarity and often have detailed explanations accompanying the photos.

If you think the digital restoration of Jaws was awesome, you need to get yourself the documentary behind the documentary of They Shall Not Grow Old! Not only was major restoration done to the film, but so too was colorization added, synching to old audio where they somehow figured which footage to sync it to, AND standardization of speed as much of the original footage was hand crank cameras and different videographers cranked at different speeds!!! The documentary, and the documentary behind it, blew me away.

My quick answer is um Hell No! I will never throw them away after I scan them. Put simply, I have 8 boxes (I mean bins)of photos of my family spanning over 50 years. (only two slides though) and I treasure them more than anything. I am older now and when I want to go down the rabbit hole of memories, I go into my closet and start looking at them. I’ve sorted them into boxes with my kids names, parents, grandparents etc. along with the childhood handprints, stories, poetry, report cards, newspaper articles, and sports postings and I know one day my kids will love to see what I saved.

When we had to evacuate from a nearby fire in So Cal two years ago, I had 15 minutes to grab what I wanted. The first thing I took was all of my pictures off of the walls and mantles, then the bins, my jewelry, and my computers and purse. No way was I going to leave my photos behind.

I do a lot of ancestry research and I can tell you that finding an old photo or letter from an ancestor online is like panning for gold…sometimes you get lucky… I started a family site and asked all of my hundreds of cousins to post old videos and photos of grandparents, great-grandparents, etc., and had they not had the originals left to them by their parents who passed, they would have been lost forever..now they are preserved (until they close up) on Ancestry sites.. yes, I remember when Picasso shut down and I had to download all of my digital files before they closed up shop..

I’m pretty sure that not many people have the login and password to your digital files unless it’s sent out before you die….most people don’t know the day they will die so Ione can assume the logins and passwords will be lost forever for most…poof..no pictures for future generations.

I came across this site because my daughter-in-law is digitalizing her last bunch of photos and is tossing the originals away. Yikes! So, I went online to see if anyone mentioned why or why not toss them after they are digitized. For her? Yes..for me. NOOOO WAY!.. I’ll keep mine and pray she will send me a copy of the digitalized ones and maybe I’ll print and frame a few 🙂

I think I will review and sort, keep the interesting ones, scan those, maybe keep a few of the originals but everything else – garbage. No one cares about them and I’m not going to try to kid myself than anyone does. that would take me from 8 boxes down to 1 or 2 but I will still have all the pictures I wanted scanned.

I have accumulated just over 5,000 slides that I took from the mid-’70s through the late ’80s. The archival scanning has been taking place for about 14 years now, mostly because I tend to procrastinate when it comes to certain tasks. I would clean and scan a few hundred slides and then not touch them for a year. Of course, there were kids, a job, family engagements, socials. Plenty of excuses to not have to sit for hours cleaning and scanning slides.
It has been 5 years since I last scanned a slide. The slides that I did scan are now at home in their 4th computer.
I am now 66 years old and one year into my retirement, so there is nothing to stop me now. I bought a new computer and an Epson V550 flatbed scanner (my old Epson scanner was obsolete) and started scanning again last December. Over the last 8 months, I scanned the last 2,000 or so slides. I finished today, the culmination of 15 years of work. And, I must say, I feel very satisfied.
Which brings me to this blog. The last week of scanning, I kept asking myself, should I keep this large box of slides or just toss them. After all, I am trying to reclaim some closet space. I’ve been storing these things since 1990 for goodness sake. I mean, these babies are backed up to Toledo and back. Two external hard drives and two cloud storage services. The reason for all the backup is that I have a small landscape photography business and aside from the slides, there are about 30,000 RAW files backed up.
So, to be honest, I was leaning toward tossing them in the trash with next Saturday’s collection. But after reading your blog and doing some soul-searching, I decided to keep them right where they are. I have been making room for them for 30 years so what’s another 30? I should be so lucky to live that long. The slides themselves are very sentimental objects. They are tactile. They are colorful. Cardboard and cellulose, stored in little plastic cubes. 36 slides to a cube, 16 cubes to a box, times 9 boxes equal 5,148 little pieces of emotion. I can’t throw that away. I’m about to cry just thinking about it.
I just had a thought. I probably have just as many prints from that same time period that need to be digitized. I certainly won’t be throwing those away either.
So Curtis, if you are still listening 4 years later, thank you for the advice!

I wonder if there is an opportunity here for a for-profit or a non-profit organization to provide both scanning services as well as long-term storage of the originals. Would thousands of people be willing to pay for digital scanning services as well as long-term storage of the originals in archival conditions?

How much would people pay now as part of downsizing, or designate funds from their wills to provide for archival services after their death? People could purchase archival storage for 25, 50, or 100 years.

Perhaps under their umbrella, a company such as Ancestry, My Heritage, or Family Search could coordinate or provide expertise in these areas by working with companies skilled in: a) photo and document storage, b) digital storage, and c) analog storage of print and paper documents.

..I have spent what seems like an eternity organizing my photos. I actually wondered today….who is going to want them or care? Can I toss more than half and never notice? I’m also “middle age” and downsizing. I’m in this “I can’t get rid if it syndrome daily and its making me crazy. Would love feedback. My kids want zero.
Need happier purging.

Love the article. Going through this same thought process myself. Thanks for the insight. I will definitely do both, scan, and save. Love your writing style. So entertaining. Made me giggle out loud a few times.

When I asked my chidren if there was anything in particular they wanted from our family home two of the three asked for the pictures. (The third one wants to live on a boat!)

My Grandfather took a mail order course from Kodak in the early 1900’s and took lots of photos which he developed himself. I have copies of these as well as all of the negatives and of course will pass them on to my children. There will be copies for both children as Grandpa made lots of copies and Mother made books for my brother (no children) and me. These documented both Grandma and Grandpa’s families as well as their married life and their children growing up. I highly value this collection.

Mother took lots of pictures of my family growing up and I also took lots of pictures. I just hope we can find enough space to preserve all of these as well as the negatives.

At 78 years young ???? I find working with all of these photos as well as other keepsakes brings me comfort and great memories now that my family, most of whom were around for over 60 years of my life, are no longer living.

Conclusion: I believe it would be a sin not to keep the originals!

I recently inherited thousands of slides taken by my parents and my uncle. I’m an only child with no children; so I didn’t need to save them to pass along to anyone. I went through all of them and scanned those with people I recognized in them (having a digital image is enough for me). The rest held no interest for me, but I couldn’t bring myself to just throw them away; so I ended up selling them (primarily in hugh lots) on eBay. That way, they still exist and they’re with someone who is either a collector or who sells to collectors. In any case, they are going to good homes, which is much better than my saving them and having them end up in a landfill after I’m gone.

One way to help you decide might be to spend a small amount of time and $$ to create “capsules” to store your slides/negatives/original prints. Think of these as time capsules. They take the smallest footprint possible to store and ultimately pass on your archive.

For several years I have used these acid free boxes from Clear Bags. They are called “Crystal Clear Boxes”. They are perfect in the 4×6, 5×7, and 8.5×11 size to sort and/or save and display your family history. A great feature is the ability to sit one of these boxes on a shelf (either horizontal or vertical} and show off your favorite from the group of up to 100 original prints inside.

They will also hold up to 120 slides. After you have scanned a bunch, it is very easy to put them into one of these boxes . . . and also fun to see your progress on display. In addition to the small amount of space they take up, you can add a custom wrap that shows what is inside the “capsule”. Pretty sure this will make it harder for anyone to throw these in the trash after all of your hard work.

Since I’m a great grandmother now, I pass on the full capsules to the family member who might enjoy them most. Since they are originals, it is fun to think they might survive. But if not, many digital versions and backups were created over the years, and hopefully they will be findable.

Here is a shot of the capsules still on my view. They sit in an inexpensive cube setup from Target. What is really cool about these cubes, other than the price, is they also sell fabric boxes that slide right into each opening. So you can store and hide your work in progress as you go. The best thing is the cubes will hold a letter size crystal clear box. So it can sort of be like a filing cabinet that takes up little space . . . and looks really cool.

Some reality checks are in order for decisions about the average photo collection. First, unless taken by a legendary pro, value is either sentimental, or historical. That is photos of family, friends, places, events, where greater import is attached to the oldest and scarcest images. None are likely to have artistic worth, except with lots of manipulation and printing for “old fashioned” cards etc. Your photos are not important to the world. If aging family can identify individuals, dates, locations, write that in pencil on the back of each photo. Once lost, that information makes such photos worthless to relatives. Consider you are “curating” a collection, so culling poorly exposed, out of focus, damaged and duplicate photos down to the few decent shots before scanning is essential, as well as in saving originals afterwards. Distilling down also serves to concentrate on those images that bring to mind a story, as that is the value in keeping them. Spending time digitally restoring even fewer special images may be worthwhile, but basic color rebalancing of faded colors may be entirely adequate for the purpose. Make DVDs of both original scans, and edited jpegs for normal viewing, perhaps with some slideshow program that adds captions or narrative describing persons, times, particulars. No one but family cares about old photos; if you’re lucky, you’ll connect with a younger relative willing to take on the responsibility of caretaking the archives. Note, regarding how “advances in technology” have died suddenly, in regard to scanning and restoration, because the market is diminishing. Film scanners are going extinct, so decide what and how best to preserve your important images now, and throw out the junk that wasted film fifty years ago.

Hi Curtis,
My dad, born 1922, used to complain about the shoeboxes full of B&W snapshots that my mom never labeled. In 2013 I inherited them, plus my dad’s unlabeled photos, plus many slides, neatly labeled by mom. None of my 3 siblings wanted any of them.
To me the treasure is the old slides of our childhood, 1947 (parents’ wedding) thru the 80’s, including many of their grandchildren. I am scanning them–thanks for the tips, Curtis!–and plan to add my memories to them. My kids and several of my siblings’ kids are looking forward to this.
Meanwhile the unlabeled shoeboxes and piles of bad slides of my parents’ trip to Europe are oppressing me! You still have your parents to share their memories. Bravo about temporary scans to give you time to collect them. But I really don’t see much value in much of this.
Unless… facial recognition allows them to be identified in the future.
Any thoughts about times you really wouldn’t save things? I would have been grateful to inherit a small, organized and annotated collection. My kids hope that is what they inherit.
Thanks! Sue M
PS. For context, my husband and I have 3000 slides, mostly his backpack trips. I inherited maybe 7000 from parents and grandparents. Plus thousands of their print photos, and thousands of mine, plus uncounted digital photos. They make us realize we are old! My kids would toss them all as unworkable. I’m teetering on the edge!
PPS. My thoughts on what to save have influenced my current photography.

I know just how this goes. My late grandfather (1854 – 1934) was an avid and skilled glass plate amateur photographer. He took extended holidays throughout New Zealand when it was still a pioneer society in the 1890’s through 1920’s and took many, many photos. I saw this collection as a 10 year old, stored in cardboard boxes, gathering dust in the late 1950’s, stored under my aunty’s house. When I next asked about the collection as a young adult, I was informed that “those old things were dumped into the Auckland Harbour”. The 1970’s was a hopeful time for the future when a lot of “cleaning house” was done so ruthlessly.
I have at least one that has survived. These were of a professional quality that our historical archive museums are now crying out for and New Zealand is the poorer for their loss.

my brother asked me where the negatives for our pictures were because he wanted to have them. 10 yrs ago when my parents moved to a seniors home, and they were downsizing they didn’t seem important enough to save so i threw them out. When i think about it now, it just breaks my heart. We dont have many pictures and we have some poor quality as well as really good quality black and whites and we are going to scan them but I am so disappointed in myself for not thinking before discarding them or not talking to someone else in the family first. Please please please save your negatives.

Another use for old photos is greeting cards, just fold a piece of card paper into a card and glue or otherwise attach the photo to the front, write your message inside, and you have a nearly free greeting card! That’s what the flower, pet and scenery photos are good for! Some could be truly meaningful if given to the right person…

I didn’t have time to read all the comments, but I have a strong sense that the poll is missing one aspect of reality, which is the uncertainty about what kids (& all offspring) will eventually want! I answered “No — I have family that wants them someday!” (19.13%), but I’m NOT SURE that is true… I have four sons and I’m HOPING that some of them or their future potential partners or children want them someday, and I’m HOPING that someone in our family will have the ability / awareness / technology to save them properly into the future as a good story that will be worth seeing (& reading – hopefully there will be written stories associated with the photos…).

Another big deal is if there are several children in a family, how do you figure out the appropriate way to divide or share the photos, and who picks which ones are worth saving?! We don’t necessarily want to reproduce the photos because of the time and expense, so dividing them fairly will become an interesting activity… what about the group shots? Who gets those? The best group shots will have to be copied I guess?? Or maybe we want to put all the best together and create a family history album that is smart and succinct, that we all get a copy of, but that way individual interests aren’t represented as well… I suppose each family has one or two people who inherited the strongest version of the sentimental gene, (which must be important for historical record saving activities,) and hopefully if there is more than one person dealing with the photos, they are good friends and can work well together, or live in the same place so they have time to spend together!

My mom just split up with my dad, and she has all the photos at the original family house, dad moved out and renovated his own new house, dad says he’s “not sentimental” and I’m guessing he doesn’t care too much about photos, especially right now… Mom just called and said she went through several of dad’s mother’s albums and took them apart and threw out the photos she thought weren’t interesting or good, hmmmm. I told mom I thought that activity might have been carried out by one or more of Oma’s grand-daughters (her five daughters), or could have been a more family oriented activity rather than a personal activity… I would have liked to see those albums and experience the intact, subtle, story-like quality they may have had, even if “most of the photos weren’t interesting”, as mom said. I said, “did you throw any of them away?”, mom said, “only the ones that didn’t mean anything?”… I wonder “but how do you know what they mean to me or to other sisters?” Buuuuuut, anyway, I live too far away to help with the project, although I might be the family member with the most interest in getting involved in the photo sorting project… not sure about my other four sisters, some of them may be interested, but it seems only a little bit…

I feel myself sighing and feeling forlorn as the past continues to flutter out of reach!

MY HISTORICAL PHOTO TRANSCENDENCE GUIDELINES for FAMILIES, especially in preparation for FAMILY REUNIONS:

-Ask all family members if they are interested in being involved in A: photo sorting, B: photo observing, C: photo storing. Ensure that people sorting certain photos have good intentions towards all family members involved including those represented in the photos and those who might be receiving copies of the photos or albums made in the process. Make the event into a fun activity, SOMEHOW!!!!

-For those who answer “yes” to A (Photo sorting / dividing), choose (a) time(s) and date(s) in the future to sort through messes of albums and photos, slides and clippings, etc. Make sure all relevant photos (ETC: Slides, clippings, posters, cards…) are available at that time.

-Prepare all those who said “yes” to B (Photo OBSERVERS), to help cover costs for the photo SORTERS, and photo STORERS, which might include travel costs, pay for hours spent, scanning rental, hard drives, copying, etc. Ask the photo “OBSERVERS” to choose their favourite form of observation: A: Online Album, B: Physical Printed Album, C: Physical Photo Collection Album of old prints; hopefully the family has only a FEW people who want the actual old photos, because those are limited, yet plentiful (probably a bit of a nightmare).

-PHOTO SORTING / DIVIDING GUIDELINES:

-You need:
-All PHOTOS, slides, negatives, clippings, art, etc. (I’m calling them all photos, for easier typing)
-Boxes
-Folders
-Envelopes
-Labelling Pens

NOTES:
-Think thrice before disassembling a previously made album, it can be simple and quick to have the whole album scanned for online viewing, while disassembling an album can result in extra work and loss of continuity or relative meaning of a photo, for example, Gran’s Cat is obvious if it’s beside a photo of her and her house, but no one would know it was Gran’s Cat if the photo was in a box, mixed up with unrelated photos.
*** DO NOT THROW AWAY PHOTOS!!!! This must be done at a family reunion after an announcement that leftover photos are available for anyone interested to sort through, people need hours to be able to get a chance to give the leftover photos a once-over, THEN, at the end of the reunion, they may then be given to any family member who wants them or thrown away. The completed FAMILY ALBUM should also be made available at the reunion (for sale, if necessary).
*** DO PLACE THE BEST PHOTOS into the folder inside the box it belongs to, the “BEST PHOTOS” folder should have the same name as the box it is in, example: “SISTER SUE’S BEST PHOTOS” is a folder in the box “SISTER SUE”. These best photos will be used for the final album, so consider carefully what photos are placed in the “BEST PHOTOS” Folder.

-Get boxes to put photos into, with a FILE FOR “BEST PHOTOS” within EVERY box.
-Include a box for all INDIVIDUALS involved, even babies. (“MOM”, “DAD”, “GRANDPA _____”, “GRANDMA_____”, sisters, brothers, etc.)
-Include a separate box for GROUP PHOTOS
-Separate box for MOM’S HERITAGE (Includes photos of ancestors and ancestral places/objects of importance from Mom’s side of the Family, etc.)
-Separate box for DAD’S HERITAGE (Includes photos of ancestors and ancestral places/objects of importance from Dad’s side of the Family, etc.)
-Separate box for EXTENDED FAMILY (Includes all photos of relatives that aren’t involved in the process, for example, photos that great aunt sent at Christmas that stayed on the fridge for a few years)
-Separate box for FRIENDS of the FAMILY (Includes all photos of friends that are not directly associated with only one member of the family.)
-Separate box for UNKNOWN photos, in case photos are not identifiable at the moment, but might be important to someone.
-Separate box for any other special considerations, for example, if mom and dad are divorced, but there are photos of the two of them together before the divorce, label a box: “MOM & DAD together” (Perhaps they won’t want to see those photos for awhile, but maybe they are very meaningful to children / siblings.) Other possibilities for extra boxes could be: Important Trips, Family Christmas… (Moments where the photos belong together in order to illustrate a good story.)
-Start sorting photos into the boxes, make sure the best photos DO go into the “BEST PHOTOS” folder within each box.
-If some family photo albums are going to be disassembled, try to capture the stories and events by grouping photos together in labelled envelopes before placing them in a box; for example: Sister’s trip to the mountains with Dad: has shots of Sister and Dad and her friends in an envelope in Sister’s box, but maybe ONE special photo of that trip goes in Dad’s Box (in his “BEST PHOTOS” folder?).
(-Try to label negatives before separating them from photographs so they are easier to identify in the future. When possible, keep negatives in an envelope with their matching photos. Prints taken from negatives are often better than scans or copies made of the photos themselves, depending on the quality of the negatives / photos. For photos in the “BEST PHOTOS” folders, having negatives will be an advantage if the family desires high quality reprints or albums.)
-Once the photos are all sorted, take the “Best Photos” Folders out of the boxes and use those to make your family photo album. The remainder of the photos in the boxes are then given to the people who want them, first dibs go to the people named on the box, then relatives may share extra photos so people have photos of one another
-Hopefully an album can be made easily enough, using scanning for digital albums, or made first in old-fashioned album format, then copied afterwards to be digitally reprinted. If old-fashioned format is used, make sure the binding can be taken apart to make scanning possible, and that plastic cover can easily be removed so they don’t leave reflection marks in scans.
-Each member of the family who wants an album should pay for their copy, or perhaps only one copy is desired, which can be passed around, observed over a cup of tea or at a family reunion to enhance family bonds!

To add another thought: I will never get rid of the old photos just as I will never get rid of all my books. There is something familiar and tactile about sorting through the “picture box” and finding treasures you forgot were there. My mom was never organized enough to put anything in an album so all our pictures are in a couple of boxes. Just sorting through the boxes has been comforting when my parents passed away recently. I do want to organize them in the boxes, probably in envelopes. I can’t afford albums.

It has been five years since I took the time to scan all of the family photos I had in my possession. We were downsizing drastically-selling most everything to move onto a sailboat and cruise for a few years. It took a lot of time-mostly organizing the photos into piles so I could scan like subjects in the same file. The dilemna was what to do with the originals? I sorted the photos giving each of my four children their original school photos, birthday pictures, graduation, etc. I held onto original photos of my grandparents, etc. I am thankful that I did not throw these photos away. It hurt bad enough to discard the many photos of zoo animals, Yellowstone scenery, but these did hit the wastebasket. I feel that it means more to hold an original photograph in your hands then it does to look at a digital copy. In fact, all of my digital photos, I have taken of my grandchildren, will be gone through, deleted if necessary, and hard copies made and put into photo albums. I am sentimental-and I am hoping the generation of my grandchildren will be that way also. Family is to be cherished and loved and remembered-posterity is important.
In closing, I would recommend not destroying the important originals. Keep them in a safe place where the next generation can strike a conversation over: look at those clothes, look at their hair, I look like my great aunt.

Happy scanning!
Linda

GREAT post!!
Very comforting to hear those words from the professional film archivists.
I don’t know if people in the future will really care about our thousands of photographs, slides, and hours of home movie footage, but it’s definitely worth it for me to have it preserved in the hopes that they will!
Thanks!! 🙂

Good article. I’m in the middle of scanning my travel negatives from 20 years ago.

A couple of thoughts. First, I don’t see any reason to keep old faded prints and albums that I made AS LONG AS I AM RECORDING THE INFORMATION AS METADATA IN LIGHTROOM. The difference between a scanned negative and one of those old prints is just astonishing and if I need a new print I’ll just send them off to Walgreens for a twenty cents a pop or whatever it is they charge. Between the digital versions and negatives in archival holders, no real need for the prints.

Second, I’m a big believer in scanning virtually EVERYTHING, for a couple of reasons as long as it is not hopeless. First, you don’t have to make decisions as you go–just scan. Second, it can turn out that the uninteresting pictures contain clues that allow you to assign data to a whole set of pictures. For example, let’s say there is a rainy day shot in the middle of several other pictures. Let’s say you knew that these pictures were taken in one particular month. Go check the weather data for that month and BAM it rained only one day. Now you know the precise day all those pictures were taken! The order and subject of photographs in a roll can give us great clues for organizing them.

A thought I’d like to add- I believe by greatly paring down our collections we may very well be increasing their chances of surviving. Thinking ahead a generation or two- who wants to look through 1000’s of photos (print or digital) of people we hardly know? Captioning and descriptions will be a significant encouragement, but as the decades progressed our photo taking is far more casual and many of mine, I know, don’t have a memorable or significant story to go along with the hundreds I can take in a single month. A box or two or a few discs invites the next owners to browse on through. A closet or harddrive full are just overwhelming and I fear will too often only get a glance and put away for “maybe later…” or be tossed for space as even we struggle now with that decision. I’m contemplating creating a core family heirloom archive that will be compact and of obvious value, and then the “extended version” for whomever-still-cares-enough to spare the space and/or time (hopefully).

Additional on the topic of tossing originals- I am definitely biased towards anything black and white or older. They just feel old and therefor valuable. Those first decades of color that are so faded, and into the years that I remember, and as quantities greatly increase- I am realizing I wrongly feel much easier about decluttering, probably over-zealously. They don’t feel “old” to me and the poor quality is influencing me, but I am NOT the only one I am creating this archive for. My children or grandchildren will probably look back with awe at 1970’s photos in a similar fashion as I do the 1920’s now. Reading your article and writing you have clarified this for me just in time to keep me from making a mistake.

I wish I could turn off the need for sleep and eating- I’d read your site from front to back and scan through the days and nights, I’m now so eager to begin.

I commented on another article tonight how much I appreciate your site, but I can’t pass up another opportunity to say THANK YOU!
~Angela

Another source of images that I did not mention above are those I took with my own digital camera. Generally I am handling these as I would any other non-print source. I don’t think I have printed a photo or had one printed in the last ten years. I also have some photos that were given to me from a Photo CD made at a drug store; these I also treat as ‘digital only’ images.

Couple of extra thoughts:
1. I am finding that, in addition to printed photos, I have quite a few photos as images acquired from non-print sources. This would include places like Facebook, or emailed to me, or via a ‘cloud source’ (like Dropbox). So my regimen has to include folding these into my digital history. This is particularly true with family images of, say, my nine grandchildren. This begs the question: ‘Should I make print copies of digitally acquired images?’. In general I have made it a rule NOT to make prints of digitally acquired images unless it is really a special one.
2. As a corollary, I am definitely keeping (previously) printed photos of my generation on back. The generation of my grandchildren are already into the digital age for the most part, so I am only keeping a few exemplars to compliment the digital collection.
3. Since someday I will pass on, I am making some effort to be sure my digital collection(s) can actually be *found* by my successors. To that end, I make periodic backups to a flash media card (or similar) and keep it in the envelope with my last will and testament. I have the media card inside a Ziploc on which I have written what is on the media card/stick so they can have some idea of the importance of the card. Otherwise, all this careful work I am doing could get lost in the shuffle down the road. (Which computer or hard drive did Dad have all that stuff on anyway?). You see?
John Hanley

Great topic! I’ve found that many family members could not wait to “dump” their old photos on me when they heard I was in the process of scanning photos. Once I’d scanned many of the really old family photos, I could not find anyone who wanted to take the originals. They were happy with the digital copies only. What I’ve decided to do is to set aside a few of the most important pictures (in my opinion) and make a small “keepers” box for me (ultimately for my son). The rest of them, I’ll be sorting into piles based on subjects so I can give them to the most appropriate family members where possible. Let them decide when to throw the pictures out. Others not otherwise given away will be put into boxes for now, to be tossed when we need the space (i.e move to our retirement home).

Hey Curtis,

Thanks for the article. I’m currently in the process of scanning thousands of slides and negatives from the past 100 years of my family. It is so time consuming that I can say with certainty, even if technology improves, I would never go through this process again. What’s more, I feel that once you have a high resolution copy of an analog image there is no difference between that copy and a photo taken with my DSLR. It’s all digital at that point and the current photos don’t have a physical copy attached. I also think the comments above about 99.9% of your slides are not interesting holds true. I couldn’t tell you how many slides are blurry, grainy, dark, poorly framed, or otherwise just plain ole terrible. My father also loved shooting landscapes while sitting on a boat fishing in Minnesota. There must be a thousand photos of shoreline off in the distance.

The point I’m making is that no one, including me, cares to view these poorly shot photos. Many of them I tossed even before scanning because they just aren’t interesting and stir little emotion. On the other hand, some photos are fantastic and not only have I scanned them I also had fresh prints made to frame some. Overall, I would say that if you are sentimental toward things then you will keep whatever you acquire over the years. And if you aren’t sentimental then you don’t care. I haven’t tossed them yet, but after I have quality scans of my images I probably will.

What are your thoughts on snaping RAW photos of slides with a DSLR by popping a flash behind them rather than scanning them? It seems as though the process would be much faster, and since it’s a RAW image the quality would be there to adjust in photo editing software later if needed.

Anyway, thanks. Also, reading your posts all night, as I try to get as far as I can on this project, has helped me feel some affirmation that what I am doing is of value to more than ONLY ME (and my sis).

Thanks for making this website.

Besides the technical tips (which I would use a lot more of, if I didn’t have less than a week to archive several thousand photos), it is nice to know I am not the only person who values my family/grandparents’ meticulously collected and organized photos. I too, think it is horrifying, to absolutely disregard and throw away treasures items – like PHOTOGRAPHS – that are collected over a person’s lifetime. It seems SO deeply and incredibly disrespectful and devaluing of a person’s life to do that – especially a person who birthed you. (or birthed your parents)

Anyway, I found your site this evening – as I am doing a rush job to try and scan my entire family’s photo collection before my 5 aunts and 9 cousins come into town for the funeral of my grandmother – in just a few days – to cannibalize all the photos that my grandmother so carefully sorted (by date, with words and details on the back of every photo – into albums). The bulk of the photos date back to 1950, when my (recently deceased) 104 year old grandfather and (even more recently deceased) 94 year old grandmother were first married in China. They span decades, continents, and generations. And they end in 2014, in Canada, just days ago.

My family seems to think that it is okay to lay all the albums out, with the whole family present, and conduct a free for all grab for photos – ripping them all from their albums, storylines, and contexts – to be folded into whatever grubby hands see seize them first

To me, that sounds like an absolute horror. It fills my gut with dread. I am HORRIFIED. I know my grandparents, who collected and took most of these photos, would be horrified. And, I am horrified that my family won’t even give me an extra week to do all this archiving. And it HORRIFIES me that some of them don’t even want me to archive them, at all. (you try reasoning with a persistent and outspoken Chinese family. In my regular daily life, I can win ANY argument – always. Against 20 of them, I am squashed. The only way to win is to not sleep until they arrive OR run off with the photos and miss the funeral)

I can see my recently deceased grandparents rolling in their graves. I have been literally scoffed at directly by a good 20 people for wanting to archive these photos. One person “forbade” me to archive them. To me, that is absolute insanity. (but i suppose i am also of the SCAN EVERYTHNG and SAVE hard copies school of thought too)

Anyway, you speak of how the younger generations or kids might not value things like photos and ancestors’ life stories. I suppose the point of my comment is to say…

I am the younger generation in my family – at 30. My sister is 25. We are the ONLY ones interested in preserving these photos for the benefit of everyone, for “posterity” (whoever that is), for our kids, for our cousins kids…. NONE of my cousins, or my aunts or uncles care at all about the material things (and treasures) that my grandparents have left behind. Yet, the two of us care and value the connection very much.

I don’t know what it is in people that causes sentimentality, or the valuing of stories (my sister and I were also the only ones who wanted to hear our grandparents) stories, but I do not think it is generational.

I think there is a good chance that whoever you save your photos for, or whoever your readers save their photos for…. someone, someday in the future will value them. They could be someone’s most treasured possessions (as my hastily made scans of my grandparents photos will be) – a connection to a person’s past, story, and family history. If we humans are not our own stories and experiences, that I think we have nothing. And if we cannot learn from history, cannot learn from the stories of other peoples lives, than I seriously doubt that we can learn anything of value at all. And, if that is the case, I think the human race is doomed to destroy ourselves (if that is not inevitable already)

Besides how to best manage the photos myself, I was looking into a good online system, so the family members could easily browse them there, and easily get copies. I haven’t found one that satisfies me. I wonder if you have looked into that too.

Scanners are already at such a quality, that you can see the grains on the images. I think it’s good enough already, and none of us are important enough, for someone in the future to care to investigate us (ideas like that are the reason I end up spending too much time on doing this. The idea that someone might some day want all this information.)

At some point, it’s just enough.

I have to say, that I put much more effort into digitizing my family’s old photos (up to 100 years old), that my own photos from the past 30 years. I find it much easier to discard my own photos, and not care about the quality. With my family’s old photos, I scanned every single picture, even just the ones of some field.

My point of scanning it all, was not to throw it all way, but to put it in a box, and throw it in my moms attic, and not worry anymore about if they should get lost in a fire, or somehow go bad.

Curtis, I have become, somewhat by default, the archivist of my family’s photo collection — all that my mother and father had, as well as all that I have collected over my own 60+ years. They take up a good part of a storage closet. Not the worst conditions, but hardly climate-controlled or disaster-proof, and I worry about them inordinately. I found your site searching on something like “choosing scan DPI” and I’ve now read a half-dozen of your posts. I breathed a huge sigh of relief just finding someone who thinks of this as a “archiving” project. That’s exactly right — it requires care and forethought to get it right. You had an eight year delay — mine has been at least half that long, with the Epson V700 collecting dust while I couldn’t get past “square one” on the most basic technical and organizational decisions (and I might add I am a decent photographer when I have the time and work passably well in Lightroom, so that wasn’t the stumbling block — it was thinking about the significance of the archive I am about to create and not wanting to start until I had gained confidence and knowledge to do better than stumble around with trial and error.) Which brings me to a multi-part answer to your question posed in this post. I love opening the old shoeboxes and albums — the album with the loose cover and black paper and photo corners in which my mother wrote, in white ink, under the pictures of me when I was an infant, or the box that originally held a pair of shoes I wore in the 1960s that became the repository for snapshots from junior high and high school. I might take the opportunity to organize them better, but it would be a loss to me to not be able to hold the originals in my hands. And there are others — those from the late 1800s and early 1900s — photos of my grandparents and my parents’ generation as children that are beautiful in their cases and cardboard frames with the name of the photographer or studio. No digital image can replace the pleasure of holding and looking at those originals, even if I can digitize them well. However, at the other extreme, I also inherited a box full of Long’s Drugs envelopes full of prints and negatives that my mother kept for decades — mostly snapshots from the 1970s after I no longer lived at home. I have no idea who those people are! I can’t imagine anyone in the future taking an interest in those pix, but I don’t think it’s up to me to eliminate the possibility. I will scan them because I want to honor my parents’ whole lives, not just the years when they were busy being mom and dad, and I will do my best to identify date and event even if I can’t identify all the people. I might consider tossing the faded prints, particularly where I have the negatives, but that’s probably as far as I’m willing to go tossing out originals — where they are not “one of a kind.” So in addition to the technological reasons you’ve given for wanting future access to the originals, I would simply add that some originals are historical documents and all of their flaws are part of their history. A digital replacement, even if technically superior, can’t replace the history the original holds (like your mother’s handwriting on the back). Who knows whether someone in the future will find more significance than we do in their imperfections? Original is original, and a digital scan is a copy. Two different kinds of archives, valuable for different reasons. Now I just need to find someone in my family to whom I can pass the torch of caring for the archive that needs its own closet!

I agree that it is a smart idea to save the originals after scanning. My hope is to cut down the amount of space however. I was thinking that after I scan a photo album I will not put the pictures back in the album, but put them in some type of container and store them. I have 30+ photo albums that I would like to reduce down to a box or two.

Hi Curtis,

Another interesting post. You mentioned ‘story-filled’ photos near the end. Maybe you should place more emphasis on the importance of the story behind each photo. A photo of a group of unidentified people at an unspecified location, on an unspecified occasion, regardless of its technical quality, will likely be of little or no interest or value to future viewers. This is probably as true of digital images as of analog images (slides, prints, negatives).

As you know, scanning analog originals is just part of the preservation story. Adding answers to the Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? of each image is at least equally important, even though it might take even longer to research the proper information for an image than it did to do the highest possible quality scan. While it may be difficult for us now to identify individuals, places, events, etc. in older photos in our collections, it will likely be even harder for future generations to add that information to our photos, even if there is a desire to do so.

Yes, it is time-consuming to add keywords, captions, and descriptions to our scanned images but today’s software like Aperture, Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, etc. makes it easier than ever to do so, especially with our born-digital camera original images. While a time-consuming process, it does add greatly to an image’s potential value to future viewers.

Some might argue that they have no family who might be interested in inheriting photo collections or albums. That is no doubt true for some people, but there may well be a local historical society or family history organization or museum that would love to acquire IDENTIFIED photographic documentation of people, places, and events in their area of interest and operations. However, without appropriate information accompanying each photo, such organizations seldom have the time or financial resources to research such photos so even if such photos are offered for free, they will most likely be refused since such organizations usually have limited storage facilities and can’t afford to accept gifts of virtually no value.

There are books and web sites available that offer guidance in identifying and dating older photos in existing collections. Various clues to dating can be found by looking at architectural styles, vehicle styles and colors (at least in color photos), clothing styles, hair styles, details such as signs and posters visible in an image, and other details.

For family photos, older relatives may still recognize and be able to name individuals. Perhaps someone in the family has an interest in genealogy and/or family history and can not only help with identifications and dating, but might eagerly look forward to inheriting a photo collection.

Getting back to your current post, I agree with you that it’s important to retain your analog originals, even after scanning at today’s maximum quality. As you mention, technology is constantly improving so today’s best quality scans may look like garbage in a few years and there will be a strong desire to re-scan at that level of technology.

Art