Scanning All of Our Family Photos … What’s the Actual Point?

I am enjoying seeing photos on my iPhone which I have had for 13 years. Never bothered much with it. Kids are enjoying it. Halfway done with scanning and figuring out how to archive, but it gives me peace to know i can share these with my family without stuffing their spaces with box after box. It makes me feel more connected to my grown kids once again having photos where I can see them,but not have to dust them.

Coming late to this discussion. I’m busily scanning negatives, slides, photos in a futile attempt to get them into Google photos before the photos count towards my data cap. The ones that get into the system before 1 June are grandfathered.

The thing I like about modern cloud storage is that the photos are auto-tagged and face-recognized. Something that would take forever even if I had the information on most of the items. Often the algorithm can trace baby through old age by facial characteristics, making surprising connections to old photos. Not perfect by any means, but much better than wading through tens of thousands of images with meaningless file names. I recently had to find a photo of my daughter at the pool when she was young for her swim team end-of-year party. A few keyword searches later, I had all that would apply.

My daughter is probably not going to be thrilled with the negatives I produced in my life, but a searchable digital database is something she will be familiar with and willing to take forward in her life if only to see what life was like in the dark ages.

After culling out and tossing bad pictures I completed a scanning project of 4,800 prints, slides and negatives on a flatbed scanner. That gave me a lot of time to think about why I was doing this. The big question I kept coming back to was “Who is the audience for this?” and I had a hard time finding a satisfying answer. The bottom line is that I realized that I am likely the only audience, especially given that many people in the photos are long gone and many names are forgotten. Even though I have children, it’s not very meaningful to show 200 photos of someone to them but not be able to share much beyond the person’s name, date of the photo and where it was taken. While there is the possibility that future generations will derive more from the photos than I do (unlikely), I really just came to the conclusion that everything is ultimately lost to history, and a lot faster than most people are comfortable admitting to themselves.

On the bright side, there was one huge tangible benefit: I freed up a TON of closet space. After all, the value of digitizing may be debatable but there is absolutely no point in keeping boxes stored in my closet for several decades (like family members did before me), unseen.

I think this is a very important topic. My mother died in 2008. Before she passed, she had created edited and titled VHS tapes of family movies dating back to my grandparents and even great grandparents. I also have no children or nephews/nieces. However, I had the tapes converted to digital, and uploaded to Youtube. I then shared them with the remaining family, and the feedback was priceless! Will my cousin’s children care as they get older? Maybe, maybe not. But one thing is certain: that box of old photos and 8mm tapes in your closet is slowly deteriorating over time. Digital can be forever! So weigh the option of letting everything eventually disappear permanently over the work it takes right now to preserve them forever. It may be a lot of work. It may be thankless. But if no one else in your family does it, the past will eventually be lost. I don’t want that on my conscience!

Now well into my retirement years, I’ve got time, particularly during the current Covid-9 pandemic. A few months ago I decided to do a “spring cleaning” of our garage, in which had accumulated years of clutter, and in which we could no longer park our car. After making some headway tossing obvious junk, I found five large boxes of photos — prints and slides — and decided it was time to attack them. Not the type of person to just chuck entire boxes of stuff I hadn’t looked at in five or ten (or twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty) years, I of course had to go through them. So for me the instigating reason was to de-clutter.

A secondary reason was that I suspected there might be interesting memories in there. As an only semi-serious amateur photographer, who blew hot and cold on the hobby, as well as being a confirmed introvert, I would tend to take photos if I were, say, feeling left out at some social event. Something to do. I’d then get them processed, and put them away, without even looking at them, many times. So, with this project, I’d be looking at photos that I’d never seen before. Could be interesting. So, reason two was curiosity.

Reason three was to prevent some surviving relative from deciding that they had to go through all these photographs after my passing. Not being a burden. I’d gone through old photographs from my parents’ collection after they had passed, with my brother and sister, and discovered what many others have posted here — lots of unknown faces and places. Unless we recognized them, they went into the wastebasket.

Reason four was that I’d been thinking about going through my photos for many years, and now I finally felt some sort of calling. Knowing that it would turn out to be a new hobby, with its own learning curve, only tangentially related to picture taking, I finally felt ready to dive into it.

Two months later I’ve completed phase one — discarding nine out of ten, taking the box count down to two. And feeling a sense of accomplishment. Now starting phase two — digitizing. Just got a V600 scanner and am learning its ropes (JPEG vs TIFF, resolution, etc. — Thanks so much for your great articles Curtis!).

I don’t believe that most photos should be saved. At least in my case, most should be discarded, and therein lies the secret to making progress. Mine aren’t the kind any historical society is likely to want. Some are family pics my sister and brother will probably enjoy seeing once or twice. Some from various gatherings of friends and friends of friends, whose members might enjoy reminiscing. Some good ones of friends’ kids. A few might be appropriate for some family tree site, and I duly note the plethora of good info regarding that in the posted comments.

Bottom line, I’ve no kids, just a nephew who’s not expressed interest in such photos. Maybe he will someday. Until then, my digitizing work continues, as long as this work keeps me content. Someday I hope to be running a slide show of these images on a poster-sized monitor hung on the wall. Or on my desktop monitor at least.

As many have said you never know who might find value in the photos you have. There is the distant family member that is researching the family tree to the local historical society because of the buildings in the backgrounds and even the people in the photo. Definitely find a place to post or donate the photos. Scan the ones that several places may be interested in.

I have 25 years of photos to organize and potentially thousands to scan. However, I have decided on the quality over quantity method. It is not a good use of my time and energy to document every detail of our lives, but I do want to have something to hold onto for my children and my later years. My advice, be select!

This is a very thought-provoking thread. I’m in my 60’s and I only have one uncle left from my parent’s generation. I’ve inherited a couple of photo albums from the 20’s and 30’s and one thought I’ve had is that there’s no one around who could identify most of the relatives, much less “besties” of grand-parents, -uncles, -aunts, etc. I had a related experience a few years ago after my estranged sister passed suddenly and it was up to me to go through her belongings.

She was an avid picture-taker and one of the things I was faced with was going through numerous photo albums of hers. I only had a few days and got little sleep throughout. It got to the point where I just tried to find the pics of family and had to get rid of most of the rest.
I had never met the people in the pics, nor had I been involved in her life enough to even take an educated guess as to who they were. It made me sad because I felt I was literally throwing away a large portion of her life.

I think context is key and to the extent possible, it would help to add any bit of information that an intrepid family or historical researcher could use to fill in some of the blanks of who, when, and where.

Thanks for the post.

Ken

I have children and grandchildren. They may or may not want to know more than an occasional look at an ancestor. But I have been struck by the history that I am reviewing. The cultural history of the times past. I have broken my archiving project into two groups. One for just family things. This one is becoming easy to purge. The other is for my self, and any one that wants to look into the cultural ways of the thirties or the sixties. The amount of local information my families gathered on building a bomb shelter, the information on civil defense during world war II, and other items from the old south. I feel that digitally I need to preserve some family stuff for a future generation that needs to be of a quality that can be read on the newer high res tech, and the cultural stuff just needs good dpi that can be researched by those who do this sort of social anthropological work.

HI,

This blog has been good to get an overall handle on what to do. I still haven’t a good solution to having my mix of scanned and later pics in a place where I can write more than cursory notes on them. I’m currently using Photos and have whittled down about 17k pics to about 13k having imported many duplicates.

My goal is to be able to write whatever I want about any pic. Not alot but a memory here and there. It’d be nice to have them all in order and I am somewhat along on that, having adjusted the creation dates of about a third of my pics so that Photos will have them in order. The other 2/3s may get done eventually.

My idea for software, an extension to Photos or some app that can use the Photo’s library as is, would have each pic on a page. On one side or the other (left up to the user), there’d be space to write what is needed. Below that space for a map and tags. All this is user-customizable. Tags, from Photos and with the ability to add new ones, would lead to pages of pics that the user could click on to see them in the set format they chose. All text would be searchable and lead to whatever pics have that text.

The apps I’ve seen so far don’t allow for good enough text additions. I don’t want to make books that I have to buy, although that could be an option if the user wanted. Just a simple photo database that has good-enough text capabilities. I’ve tried using text editors and that gets complicated fast, copying and pasting from Photos. Would someone want to design this software? A free version would be nice with a paid option if you want to store your pics on the cloud…

I’d love to hear any suggestions on how to accomplish what I’m looking for. Thanks.

I scanned many photos last year to make a slide show for my mom’s memorial service. Was thinking I’d like to do the same for my dad who died many years ago. I’m glad I did the one for my mom though because of tech difficulties few ppl saw it. For my own use, I would like to have organized slide shows of trips that have been meaningful as well as some collections of key times of my life as well as a show of old family photos that will tell a story. I’m a writer in my early sixties and envision I’ll enjoy these in the future. And, it leaves a record behind. I face the fact that my photos may end up discarded. I will probably have to off-load many myself. The point is to think about how I’ll enjoy them myself, the doing of the project and the having.

I agree with the sentiment that the photo files are not ultimately worth much if they stay on your computer and are eventually deleted because no one in your family is interested in them after you’re gone. However, chances are very high that there is SOMEONE out there who would give anything to have one of those photos – because someone in their own family is in them. Many family photos have other people in them who are aunts, uncles, cousins, or even direct ancestors of someone who is not in your immediate family or among your direct descendants. I am into genealogy and have found photos that unknown relations have attached to their online family trees that depict my own ancestors. These are priceless to me. I have several branches of my not so distant ancestors where there are absolutely no photos. If I knew that someone out there had a box-full of photos that just might have one of my ancestors in it, I would be ecstatic.

The problem is – how do we share all these photos and how do we find out who has them? I have scanned at least 1000 photos and have several thousand left to go. I’ve named them in such a way that you can order them chronologically and tell who is in them and what I’ve done to edit the photo. Then I’ve added keywords to the metadata. It is a LOT of work, but I would gladly share them with anyone. Too bad there is not an online repository for these collections or at least a way to alert people that you have a collection that potentially contains photos of particular families, or something like that. A photo of an ancestor is the “holy grail” of a genealogist!

This is an interesting dilemma. It is a lot of work to scan all these photos – an overwhelming amount of work, it seems sometimes. And then to name the files and identify whose in them….. it is exhausting. So, it does seem reasonable to question the value of it over the long-term. But, I also know the thrill of stumbling across a photo of one of my ancestors as an incidental in someone else’s photo of their grandparent’s wedding party, say. The ultimate value of these scanned collections will lie in our ability to share them beyond our own immediate families. Maybe “Scan Your Entire Life” has some ideas on how this could be done….

I am 80 years old and currently am the oldest living member of my family. Sometime about 1995 I decided to find out more about “us”. I wanted to know how and why our ancestors came to the USA. I tried to pin down the many stories of shipboard romances on the way to America and other tales. I learned that about half of the family stories were either exagerated or were just fabricated to fit situations. But, happily, I also found a large number of relatives that had drifted away from the main part of our family and who had become forgotten.

I had inherited or got the use of most of the photos from both sides of the family and it was a daunting task to attempt scanning all of them. That’s why I became very selective. There are well over 50,000 photos in my computer, some dating back to about 1870. All of this made a good story with a family tree and photos. Everything is freely available to all members of my extended family. However, what I learned is that almost without exception, only a few care to even have the family tree. Almost none have any interest in the photos or the story.

With any luck at all I expect to be around for many more years. I ‘ll continue my family research, although at a lesser effort, because I now know that no one really cares. It’s sad. Other than taking necessary financial and some personal information off my hard drive, I expect my PC will be wiped clean and probably tossed out. The photos and family trees will probably be forgotten as though they had never existed.

And I smile when I think that someone in the 2100’s will wonder about their past and think why no one ever made a family tree or saved family photos.

I’ve been thinking about this since I read the other day. To be honest I was inclined to agree with you. Then the other day a cousin that I haven’t seen for 50+ years sent me 2 photos asking if I could identify . Luckily my 92 year old mother was able to help. The first was the wedding picture of my maternal grandparents. The second was my grandmother’s parents, my great grandparents. My husband came in the room and saw me with tears streaming down my face and asked what was the matter. I explained they were tears of joy because I had never met them or seen a photo of them before. If someone hadn’t scanned them and sent to me I would never have known and neither would by cousin. You never know who might be interested now or at some distant date in the future.

I’m kind of a history lover. I love a good story, and honestly, every life has an interesting tale to tell. It just needs to be told. One of the best ways for it to be told is in photos. I recently scanned some old letters from an army buddy of a man I barely knew. My father’s brother had passed away, and when his wife’s brother, John, died, she called us, (not their blood relatives) in to help with his personal effects. Then she died. We had all these things that had nothing to do with us, and largely we eliminated it. But the letters from old friends and so on were so interesting, particularly those from the Korean War. This war buddy told of how cold their tents were and how they huddled around an old potbellied stove to stay warm, how he missed going bowling with my departed un-relative, and talked about what he looked forward to when he got home. He wished John and his mother a Merry Christmas and sent love. I saw the whole scene in my mind’s eye. And I wished for a photo of this man. I wanted to experience the conditions there in Korea with him. I didn’t even have a full name for the guy. But if I did, I’d have tried to track him down and tell him Thank you for his service.

We never know who our photos will impact, and with services like photo memories on websites like FamilySearch.org where our photos are attached to our names and stories about them can be uploaded, we never know whose life will be positively influenced by them.

Just my two cents, but I love seeing what was and the life within photos.

In answer to Jennie’s concern about who cares, that’s just the point, she doesn’t know who might care down the road. I’ve been scanning photos of my great grandparents who were the first of that generation to arrive in the US. My regret is that my parents didn’t let me know about these photos so I could have asked questions about them.

I value my time and I would feel very remiss if I didn’t help to pass along these wonderful pieces of history. I have photos of them on a trip to Kansas in the 1930’s and standing in front of an Oregon Trail marker.

I’ve put the photos on my website and sent the link to older family members hoping to obtain identification of people I didn’t know. It is working so far. I’ve heard from several people helping to complete the puzzle.

I feel like a historian or biographer documenting what life was like for my family. A worthwhile endeavor.

A couple of thoughts based on my research –
1. I get a lot more info from a photo than just people/names. Buildings, locations, dress are all clues to life in a period of time. I look at the photo albums in the library of my family’s town and learn about the times my ancestors lived from these photos and stories. So, one possibility beyond one’s personal use would be to contribute these to some sort of archive. If the photos are from a specific area, a local library would probably love to have these for their collection of local history.
2. You never know when a branch of your family might want to learn about your family. I’ve learned about my branch of the family from contacts with more distant cousins. Having photos is always helpful. Your branch may be small, but you are one of hundreds of descendants from only a few generations back.
3. That said, with no one to inherit and carry on the family story, I would severely edit the photo collection, digitizing only those photos that show important moments – weddings, christenings, family portraits and the like with perhaps a few photos that tell stories, show locations or other info important to the family character.
4. Have you thought of writing up your family’s story, as you know it, as a narrative, adding photos to illustrate it? Offer this to genealogy societies, libraries, or other archives of the family locations. It’s a service whose impact you will likely never know, but it could be considerable.
5. If the idea of digitizing everything is too daunting, more than you’d like to take on, could you at least do something smaller – culling the collection and adding notes of date, names and locations where known and then offer the collection to some genealogy archive as suggested above.

This is a worthwhile question to ask before investing hundreds of hours into a scanning project. I wrote about my personal motivations for scanning and cataloguing 2k photographs in this SYEL blog post.

In short, I did so without thoughts of genealogy or archiving; I simply wanted to see them regularly, something that is unlikely to happen when they are in a shoe box.

If you place a few digital photoframes around your house with each showing a new picture every thirty seconds then you are likely to see any given photo every few weeks. This is even the case with large collections of tens of thousands of images. My wife and I call our digital photoframe meTV because it’s like television but it’s all about me. We joke that it will always give us something to talk about. I write a caption for each photo (and also for all the digital photos that I take), which ties in with Mr. Malling’s comments about stories below.

However, when it comes to family photos that I didn’t take I am much more selective: if I don’t want to look at it myself then I don’t scan it. Furthermore, I am wary of my own pictures being diluted by those of others. Naturally, genealogists and family archivists (such as my mother) will have their own criteria for scanning in prints. In some cases it may be easier to spend 2 minutes scanning in a picture than 5 minutes trying to decide whether to scan it.

I’ll answer without looking at other responses, but I’m very interested to hear what others think.

I, too, am the “family historian,” having inherited all the boxes of photos on both sides of the family and my husband’s boxes of family photos. I see at least two good reasons to scan photos, even if you have no one coming after you to inherit them.

• You and your ancestors are related to many other people who would appreciate seeing a photo of one of their ancestors and learning any history you might know about them. There are people searching ancestry sites hoping to find just such a treasure. I, for example, am hoping that someone out there has a photo and some history about my husband’s great grandfather and grandmother and also his grandparents. My mother-in-law got dementia before we realized that we hadn’t asked her for more information about her family tree, and now we’re kicking ourselves!

• Secondly, you’ll be inspired and encouraged by reliving the stories of your family and seeing their photos and knowing that you’re getting a peek into the 20th century from a very personal level you can’t find in the history books.

• And finally, not everyone will agree with me on this, but you don’t have to scan ALL the photos. I decided not to scan the photos of all the young women who were classmates of my mother-in-law when she went to nursing school at the Mayo Clinic. I don’t know who they are and they aren’t related to our family. I also chose only a few of the best photos of my husband’s grandparent’s ice fishing and deer hunting photos, since they had so many. And I rarely scan unknown landscape photos and travel photos that don’t add to a family story.

I do believe that family stories are worth telling. At a family reunion this month I shared three stories about my parents that have impacted and inspired me. There were four generations at the reunion, everyone from my 90-year-old mother to the newest great grandchild. All three stories were about hard circumstances where one or both of my parents made the right choices, even when tempted to do otherwise. These are stories that can inspire anyone, not just family members, and I do intend to tell them to others, perhaps in a blog post, and include a photo to make it even more interesting and real.

Scanning does take time and effort, but so does anything worthwhile in this world. Wishing you all the best in your decision, Jennie!

Someone you don’t know may want the older photos of parents, grandparents or great grandparents. Check with a local historical or genealogical society. It would help if the photos have some ID.

“All of us last Sunday”

That’s what was written on the back of many photos from my grandfather’s early life in San Marcial, New Mexico, circa 1910s. He had worked the Santa Fe railroad, his father was in lumber and town undertaker. He refused to join a business deal to create a chain of hotels with his friend there, who was Conrad Hilton. No, my grandfather was sold on steam technology! He went on to be one of the original mechanics at the Alameda Naval Air Station in California, building a small train and tracks there to generate their own steam energy.

But I was in my late 20s when I discovered his photos and tried hard to meet him to talk about and name some of these historic photos. But it was too late. He died before most of these photos were correctly identified. And surviving family cannot explain most of them either.

Today I am a member of our local genealogy society and have done a DNA test with Ancestry.com. Through this I met a 2nd cousin whose grandfather worked the same railroad in NM as my grandfather (brothers) and I was able to send her some photos of him. There was even a book written about that era in NM with her grandfather’s grade school photo. She was thrilled to get the digital copies. That’s quite a gift to give a newly discovered cousin.

Plus I learned there is a big genealogy web site called Dead Fred, where you can post copies of photos that are unknown to you to see if anyone recognizes them. What fun!

I also just discovered a product called Flip Pal, a mobile scanner that can do 600 dpi scans while you are on the couch in front of TV. They also make a software that can record your voice memories on top of the image (for a second scan perhaps). That’s a huge incentive for me to get through my overwhelming pile of inherited photos.

I would also recommend Scrivener as a piece of software that can help you write your own words to accompany the visual memories of the best photos. It is used by writers and can compile book formats really well.

So what if my paternal grandfather had despaired of anyone ever taking an interest in his photos and thrown them all out? My husband and I have no children, but I realize that freed me from worrying IF my children would ever take an interest in their history. I do the photo work and genealogy anyway because it is an ungrateful IKEA culture. Some day they will grow up. Some one at some time will want your stories. You might as well gift them with the truth, carefully told from your view today.

Thank you for giving me a chance to write down my own incentives!

Why scan your family images. Great question, and the answer will be different for each individual. And the answer – the value of those images can change through time. I think one must be open to that change. This happened to me. At one point in my life, certain photos meant nothing, and I would have gotten rid of them. I was grateful to have them years later when whatever it was in me changed and they became valuable again. Also, for those who don’t have close relatives, with global connections being made through DNA/ancestry, there could be a relative out there who would really appreciate seeing images of their distant family members.

My son basically asked my wife the same question about her 10-year genealogy project. He felt she should have a goal other than creating a family tree. She told him that the research, verification, and history excited her, and she hoped that it would be of interest to him, his sister, or their children in the future.
Five years ago, I began to scan photos of our kids’ early years because my wife wanted to get rid of the photos, so we didn’t have to pack them the next time we moved. Through your site and photo restoration books I learned that we needed to keep them because they were the originals, and there may be better scanning software and restoration techniques in the future. Two years ago, I thought about the scanning. Would the children rescan the photos if they already had digital copies? Would they migrate the digital copies to future media? Would they even keep the digital copies? I’m glad I kept scanning because last year my daughter wanted pictures of her early childhood for a slide show for her wedding. It was very easy for her to browse the photos and copy the ones she wanted.
I’m now scanning photos from my college and Army years and plan to scan photos from me and my wife’s early years, and my mother’s early years. I hope in the future when the kids look at their scanned photos they will look at the other family photos and become interested. I’m willing to do the scans and take the risk that the children will want them when they get older.

Great question.

I’m an avid photographer and genealogist. I’m firmly in the “scan and keep” camp. I’ve got an archive of 38K photos, and this past weekend my aunt gave me a few hundred more. First off, I love old photos. I learn so much from them, and the process of scanning and archiving actually improves some of the originals. Secondly, as a genealogist, I define the concept of “who might be interested in this stuff” broadly – we all have far more family than we know personally. Families can and do grow apart, and there are only a few genealogists in every family – the keepers of the stories, documents, facts, photos, and sometimes memorabilia – but we definitely exist.

Earlier this year, I was talking to a cousin. Her mom and my granddad were first cousins. During our talk, I realized I had pictures of her mom as a teenager – photos my cousin had never seen. I shared them with her, and in return she shared more with me. It felt amazing to be able to give these to her, and it was great to be able to finally identify that group of pictures.

I didn’t know I’d be able to do that when I started the scanning project. I didn’t know how all encompassing the project would be, nor how much I would learn. I do know the work has made me a much better genealogist: I can picture whole decades’ worth of events: dances, street scenes, vacations, clothing. I wouldn’t have that knowledge without scanning that first project of what turned out to be ~9000 photos and 5 years of work. Thank you very much for your site! I just recommended you to my genealogy group last week.

Linda

For the link, I’ll give you my blog post on how I scanned the first 3000 photos.

I’m a geek, and pretty anal about keeping things in order. I also have a computer background, so to me there was never a question about scanning all of my photos. That said, there are 3 main reasons that I do it:

1. I’m paranoid of losing all of my photos in a fire or storm. A neighbour’s house burned down a few years ago and I realized if that were to happen, the one thing that I would be very upset about losing is all of my photos, especially the ones from my grandparents that show our family. They can’t be replaced, but if they’ve been scanned and backed up properly, you won’t lose them, regardless of what happens. With all of the storms, forest fires and flooding that have occurred in the past year, that seems to be reason enough to get everything scanned.

2. I’m a bit of a historian, so I like the idea of having photos from the past and being able to keep them, and share them. Scanning them is the one way I can try to keep them. Even if your family isn’t interested in them right now, they may appreciate it when they get older. And you never know who might appreciate seeing them in the future. Imagine if the cavemen had said ‘Oh, we should get rid of these photos on our walls, nobody else is going to want to see them!’

3. And sharing does not have to be with your family. I am from a small town in northern Ontario, Canada, and there is a historic photo group on facebook, established specifically for sharing historic photos. Often photos are shared that to me seem like personal, family photos, but they always seem to trigger a memory from someone who seems unrelated. I like the idea of being able to share my photos, particularly old family ones, with others. You never know who might really appreciate seeing it! I found a picture of me as a little girl with my grandmother, watching a Santa Claus parade, in the background of a picture that someone else posted.

I Having been researching our family genealogy since 1996. My mother enjoyed taking pictures as a young woman so I have her albums covering 1933-54. I’ve scanned them all and reprinted many. There are 1700 people in my genealogy program from both my father and mothers family. There is no one among them that have any interest in these photos. Not only that but between myself and several close cousins none of our children or grandchildren have any interest in family artifacts. They are all “Ikea” people in that they throw things away and by new. Having their great grandmothers furniture as an heirloom holds absolutely no interest for them. Since they have no interest in something that might bring a few dollars they certainly have no interest in old photos. I’m 74 now and my hope is that I will have the opportunity to destroy all my family’s history before I die. I don’t want my family throwing it out, I want control over it all. I continue to edit and print old photos and get the utmost pleasure from doing so. I no longer hope that my children will feel the same way.

It’s an interesting question. I have scanned in nearly every family photo I could find. It took over 3 years. The very old family photos are interesting to me, but my only sibling seems to have no in interest in them. My own kids are too far removed from the people in the old photos. There are many very old photos in which I don’t recognize the person/persons in them, and any family who might have shed light on them are deceased.

Just as children don’t have much interest these days in their parents things when they pass on, I’m afraid that old photos may meet the same fate. With everyone having a camera in their pocket these days, and because it costs nothing to take thousands of photos (except for some storage fees), they have a difficult time managing their current photos, and probably don’t want to be bothered with thousands of old photos, many of them with people they’ve never known.

I will probably put all the old family photos I have in some online photo albums. If they want to see them, they can. But I seriously doubt they download many of them. I find, not only with my own family, but having talked to many young people, that today’s youth hasn’t the same kind of interest in family history, or any history for that matter. Kinda sad. Actually, really sad.

Obviously some pictures are ten a penny (especially scenic travel photos where they only mean something to the person who took the photo) and the bad ones of these I’m destroying and the good ones are going into photobooks so that I can enjoy these memories in my lifetime. Whilst I’m alive, photos of my friends make me smile, but I don’t anticipate anybody related to me will keep them when I have gone, so maybe I will scan and share with my friends or their families now so that at least there are copies for them to enjoy or add to their family history. The rest of my “heritage” or “family” photos I will definitely scan for future generations even though there are thousands that I consider to be in the “family” category and the task of scanning them all is going to be a hefty one. Being a keen family historian, I LOVE to have photos of anybody in the family tree regardless of whether they are directly related or whether they belong to one of the side branches. I think the question was a very good one and highlights the need to be discerning with what you are leaving to future generations. If it adds to your story or some other relative’s story, keep it, otherwise throw it away. Someone, somewhere, sometime is going to appreciate the fact that you saved a particular photo. It is interesting to note that I find any recent photos (anything taken after I was born in 1960) much easier to destroy than the older ones (taken before I was born). I must remember that my photos will one day be “old” and possibly more interesting to those descendants who will be born in the future, than they are to current living generations.

I have been considering exactly this too for the last couple of weeks. I’ve just scanned about 1000 photos for an aging, distant relative. Very nice for her to have the photos in digital form as she’s downsizing. But after she dies, nobody will have interest in those photos – actually I asked her right away. Nobody. It’s a weird feeling because the photos represent the mind of this person.

The same goes for myself. I’m in the 50ies, and even though I have kids, I’m not too sure how interesting my old photos will be for them. Maybe when they grow older. At least I find it quite amusing to watch my deceased parents’ photos. And even my grandparents.

The key to this would be if we could record the STORIES that the photos are indeed documenting. If I could record memories from that trip, or about the way we celebrated birthdays, or the first day at school, and about school all together. We try to record some sporadic details about the photos in the form of metadata, folders and file naming. But these are not STORIES. A story may span several photos. So what COULD be interesting for descendants is the stories about how life was lived at that time. That may have interest for the general public as well. But the photos on their own – well, realistically, I don’t really think they will be enjoyed very much by my descendants. Not the whole lot, anyway.