Scanning All of Our Family Photos … What’s the Actual Point?
Hi Curtis,
I found your site as I'm in the position of being the sole heir to my family photos. My first logical thought was to scan them all, but I'm struggling a little with the question of … why? What's the actual point?
As the ones scanning, we get the enjoyment and satisfaction of going through the photos, reliving memories and seeing moments of our parents and grandparents lives. We might even print a few off in a bigger size to put up. But then all it is, is 6,000 photos sitting on a drive. I don't have any children or nieces/nephews, so what happens when I die?
Even for those with children, are they interested? They might enjoy a few photos of their grandparents, but the older slides will be of people they never knew. Even less so for the next generation.
It's probably far too morbid and depressing for a post, but it's just something that I think about. There's a lot of information about how to scan all your photos, but not much discussion on why. It's just presumed as a given.
Many thanks!
Jennie Shingfield
Norfolk, England
For anyone with children or with other family members such as nieces or nephews, the answer to whether or not we should scan our old family prints, slides, and negatives may seem quite obvious.
But, when I received this email from Jennie, asking me why she should go through all the trouble of taking on such a big scanning and organizing project when she doesn't have younger family to pass it on to, I was struck with the thought that many of you might be asking yourselves the same question. Maybe even for some of you who actually do have family to pass your scanned collections on to!
Let's Discuss This Please
I would love to open this up for discussion with everyone here because I think this topic is so important.
The question that's really at hand might be summed up best like this:
If you don't have or know anyone that will truly cherish your scanned photo collection once you've passed, is there even a single reason to scan any of your old family photos?
Can one person derive enough pleasure from the outcome of having all of their old (analog) photos scanned and turned into a digital form to warrant making this project worth the time and energy involved?
Please Share Your Thoughts With Us
I wrote Jennie back and gave her a small handful of reasons I thought might help her make the decision of whether it's truly important for her to still scan and organize her family's photos. But I told her I was going to post her important question here for all of you to read and think about for yourself as well. There will be many reasons you come up with that would have never occurred to me to share with her.
Your Personal Task:
In the comment area below, I would love for you to share the thoughts you came up with of what inspires you or will someday inspire you to finally begin to scan and organize your old family photo collection.
Two important things:
Don't Be Influenced
Please don't be swayed at all by what others write. Your opinion matters just as much as theirs. If you feel you might be, don't read what others have written until after you've posted your own comment.
(And know that you have 3 hours after you hit “Post Comment” to come back and edit your comment should you think of anything else you'd like to add or change. 😉 )
Same Answers Are Actually Good
Just because one person writes that “Reasons A, B, and C” are what is inspiring them to scan and organize their collection, doesn't at all mean you shouldn't say the same “Reason A and C” also inspires you. In fact, it's actually quite the opposite. The more people who say they are inspired by the same specific reason(s), may be all some people who are “on the fence” of whether to do this project or not will need to understand this project will also be rewarding for them. Many us feel the most secure when we share a commonality with others.
I would love for this post to be an ongoing discussion here for today, tomorrow, and for the years to come. The answers everyone gives will truly be inspiring for every single person reading them in the future who are sitting there debating whether even scanning a single small box of prints is worth their time.
We can't wait to read what you've shared!
Your voice and the way you choose to word your advice to Jennie and anyone else reading this who is feeling the same way may be the single factor that will inspire them to take action and find joy with their new digital collection.
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 like your optimism, Stephanie! I feel the same way about this unknowing potential of every photograph. Some of my favorite photographs in my family’s collection are ones that are ones others might consider tossing.
One of my favorite examples, I have a photograph that’s not pretty, but it’s taken showing the backside of our family’s garage — from the outside. It’s the only shot in our entire collection the shows this part of the house! It’s a view that wasn’t burned into my memory, so being able to see a detailed photograph has really helped to fill in the holes of my memories this special house I grew up in.
Commenting over a year later…I am working on a video about the history of my church. They built a new sanctuary several years before I was born, and the original building was remodeled at the same time. So of course, I had never seen the inside of the original building before it was remodeled, and since the remodel was done before digital photography came along, no one ever took any photos of the interior of the old building unless it was a special occasion…such as a wedding. Several people brought me photos of their weddings that were taken inside the original building before it was remodeled, and I have been scanning those for use in the video as well as to save for future reference. To the people who brought me the photos, these are just photos of their wedding…to me and future generations, these are the only photos that show what the inside of the original church building looked like. I’m sure there are many people who don’t care about the photos one way or the other, but for anyone interested in the history of the church, those photos are pretty valuable.
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!
Absolutely! This is a great plan, that will help to really give you a jump start into tackling such a massive project. It’s so important we start moving and getting momentum, and for some people, doing what you just said is an excellent way of removing a huge barrier that is preventing someone from feeling they could EVER put a dent in the project — and therefore never even start.
Worst case, Kara, you could love the entire process so much, when you get to the end of scanning your “quality” photos, you may have the desire to go back and scan the rest of your collection that you initially didn’t see a real purpose in scanning. Or hey, maybe even a family member will get excited from your work and want to help out. 😉
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.