What would you do with photographs?

If you have the time and patience, pick some of the best from the holiday photos, mainly happy faces, one of a camel or a nice view or whatever to make it clear where they were. Label them with year and location. Make an album out of & call it holiday snaps, give it to Mum for Xmas for something to flick through or chat about the experiences she had when you visit. Include lots from different years so you can see them change, laugh with Mum at the hairstyles / fashion. Be ruthless with the rest.

Keep the older photos / special photos

If very old photos might a museum like them especially if taken at a recognisable local landmark?

We have a load of photos, mostly of family but I have no idea who they are. Old grainy shots from the early 20th century. I don’t even know which side of the family they belong to. Sadly they are all going to get destroyed once my dad dies. There is no point in keeping ‘some random ancestor or maybe it was their friend who was getting married’ photos.

When MIL went into a care home we'd try to take in a bunch of photos or an album every time we visited and go through them with her. (Mentally she was as bright as a button to the end - at 101) It gave us something interesting to talk about - we lived some distance away so visits tended to be a whole afternoon rather than a daily half hour.
She and FIL did 2 or 3 cheap package tours every year usually to a Greek island or Majorca - she couldn't remember where most of those pictures were taken so we felt at liberty to chuck away lots of them right away - keeping some with nice images of MIL and FIL.

Other pictures that we found interesting we noted her explanation on the back; pictures she particularly cherished we weeded out after she died. For instance these were a couple of trips to Canada which we talked about several times and she always had new and interesting memories. We've kept some of the scenery from those as well as people - airports, cars, Vancouver Streets were so different in the 1960s 😃

Scan them all in and. Put on a digital photo frame then get rid of them.

Hi, it took me a while sometime ago but I actually scanned the photos to digitally preserve them, I did try to just keep the ones that were of people or things that meant something, homes, pets etc and discarded scenery etc, now they take up no space but I still have them.

I have a fantastic app called photomyne. It scans slides, negatives and photos. I've tried a few this was my favourite. I waited until there was an offer on and paid for 2 years.

I have loads of treasured slides that now are digital photos. If someone who died young and was very special to me. It's like treasure. My DH then animated some and made a short video (so moving head, blinking, smiling) astounding. (I have no video of this person).

You may have treasure like that.

Can you make a slide show and entertain her one weekend Witt what you’ve found? She might love it!

Yes. But anything sold cheaply as a negative scanner is only going to produce ok-ish results. Certainly good enough to tell if it's worth scanning in more detail.

Almost all High St prints from film camera these days are made from digital scans of the developed negative. But you need a high resolution scanner to get the detail from a negative.

One thing to bear in mind with old photographs is that there's a huge market for stock imagery. It's not a lot per image, but some subjects can be in-demand. If you come across a collection a relative had built-up all on the same subject, it's worth seeing if an image library will make you an offer.

We bought a Kodak Scanza Digital Film Scanner during the first lockdown and have been wading our way slowly through my dad's mountain of negatives. One of his cousins can help with the names of people from his birth country.

Dad was a very keen photographer and at one point even had a darkroom set up in the bathroom at home.

I’m grappling with this as my cousin gives me a bag of old photos on each of her annual visits to the UK. I’ve done a bit of research and discovered that all photo prints can fade, degrade, and become indecipherable. There are a few precious photos of the grandfather I never knew, as a little boy in the 1910s, and his siblings, they are very faded, so I’m going to get these scanned asap as these photos are around 100 years old.

I’m planning to sort through and discard a lot ( it’s hard, but no point keeping pics when you don’t know who the people are, or very poor quality pics). Scan the rest, and stick a few online in my family tree. I’ll keep the best prints, fully labelled!! Full names and approximate d.o.b. I’ve learnt from stray photos that have popped up in my family research, it’s invaluable to have full names, not just ‘Uncle Joe and Aunt Rose’. I have a wonderful portrait of a couple from around 1890 ….we THINK they’re my great- great grandparents, but there are no names on the photo and we can’t be certain.

All the prints I keep, will go in acid free boxes, in acid free paper sleeves, to preserve them. I’m planning to pull out the best ones of my parents, and us kids when we were little, and put them in an album. There are prints that I’ve never seen before, so should be fun!

My mum also had boxfuls of holiday photos. I looked through every single batch of photos and extracted only those that had nice photos of mum and dad and threw the rest away. Since most of the pics they'd taken were of landscapes, hotels etc, I had thrown away about 95% of all the holiday photos.
I then looked through the ones I'd taken out and weeded those down to just a few nice photos.
So, from about 600 photos I've ended up with about 20.

The older photos have been a bit harder to sort through. I made a start but it's a mammoth task. I must get stuck into those again soon, as I have a box full of them still.

I bought a photo scanner from Argos and have been working my way through our family albums. I got rid of anything without people or recognisable events and that cut it down drastically. I've then scanned and digitised all the rest.

And wile you're at it, scan a selection of her looking happy at different ages to be rotated randomly at her wake.

Scan them all and put them on a usb stick in a digital photo frame on a perpetual random rotation. That way she can at least see them.

@MereDintofPandiculation I agree with my brother too, if he can find a way to make a film using these pictures it would a worthwhile project and he certainly has the skills to carry it out well. In his art student youth he also went through a phase of taking a photo booth picture of himself every week for at least year and he wove those into a film, though I can't remember what happened to it.

As for the pictures out the back window, we shall see! 'Warholesque' is a good way to put it.

I agree with your brother, that sequence of photos sounds really interesting! But only if your mind moves that way. Definitely no duty to keep them all.

I was thinking it would be interesting to append a photo to each entry on the family tree, preferably all at the same age, possibly young adult, and look at the family resemblance down the decades. One day I might actually have time to do it!

Agree absolutely once the person is dead. But in the post you responded to, the lady is still alive, and would most definitely look at them and put them up around their room if she were given an opportunity. So to say "these belongings of hers are a nuisance to me, I'll throw them out, she won't notice" is treating her wishes as unimportant, and treating her as less human, as someone whose wishes no longer matter.

We have a similar issue with my mother's photos. Her and my dad divorced in my teens and she lived with her mother. There are hundreds and hundreds of photos of my grandmother that cover at least 30 years and it's as if she took one every day. In all of these pictures, my grandmother is sitting in the same chair, in the same position, with the same expression on her face and the only difference is her gradual ageing. My mother also seems to have taken a picture out of the back window every day for the same period of time and there are many boxes of exactly the same shot, taken over decades. It was my older brother who cleared them all out and he's got them at his house. He's a film maker and is considering using them for a project. I'm not sure how much interest it would get, but amongst certain arty circles someone might enjoy it simply out of curiosity.

But they just take up space and nobody looks at them.
Why spend ages and ages sorting out someone else's old photos?

That seems so heartless to me

When my parents died, I went through all the old photos and if they were blurry, people I didn’t know (only child, no family to ask) too many of the same country views, out they went. Kept wedding album and older family pictures.
My husband is custodian of his family’s cine film, and it’s lovely to see him and his brothers and sisters as children in the sixties.

With such jumbled hoards you have to start with the basics. I'd get a bunch of decent boxes (I like the the Really Useful Box ones as they're strong and stack).

The important stuff goes in one (birth, marriage certificates), the rubbish (seed catalogues) go in a black sack for the bin, and the photos get divided between two boxes of the ones you want to keep and the ones to come back to later, and a box of stuff to sell/donate. Anything in a frame comes out of the frame and the photo goes into one of the photo boxes. That will quickly reduce the volume, getting rid of the rubbish and the frames.

We have a similar issue with my parents home. When we work through it in too much detail we get bogged down with, "What's this?", "Never seen this before", "Do you remember..?". The trick was to be fast, ruthless with the rubbish, keep an eye out for the important/valuable, and reduce the volume as fast as possible.