What do you do with old family photos?

[Nugg]

I mean, literally two trunks full of my grandparents photos my parents photos my own family photos

I intend to gradually go through them and get rid of the thousands of photos of zoo animals and the like🤦🏼‍♀️🫠

I have always been a sentimental holder, however as the last couple of years I’ve become a lot more pragmatic mostly due to having had to clear out to separate parental homes following their deaths😢

But I have ended up with every single family photo that we found and I’m struggling to know what to do.

Obviously, I want to keep some of them and I will ask my aunt and Uncle from each side if they want any of their parents photos but I strongly assume they will already have some.

It just feels so wrong to dispose of them, but my own children probably won’t feel the same and they will end up just being disposed of at some point anyway!

i’m having a real moral dilemma over this! Probably because I love looking at old photos And the incredible memories they hold not only for me, but the amount I’ve ended up with is just unbelievable and I literally have nowhere to put them. They are currently in storage unit that I am trying to empty to save money on paying for it.

I photographed the ones I wanted just by using the camera on my phone.

Please offer them to family to take some. All my grandparents photos disappeared and I ever got to have any of my own. My dad wasn’t really involved and I didn’t know it was happening as I don’t know my aunts and uncles very well.
my mum just took everything of my nans and we don’t talk

I wish I had some photos of me and my grandparents

I too inherited most of my parents' photos, all of my grandmother's and was also given a box full of photos by a distant cousin (whom I've only met once, about 25 years ago).
I've chucked loads of my parents' holiday snaps away. Also chucked loads of my own away.
I tend to keep the interesting ones, ones that have family members in. I don't keep photos of landscapes and seaside and so on.

For me the real problem stuff is the stuff that is the most fascinating - old family wills, documents from the 18th and 19th centuries relating to family members. I have crate-loads of it! I don't know what to do with it! When I die it will be my children's problem to decide. Currently they don't seem to want it. None of us really has the space to store it or the time and motivation to sort through it all.

Just a printer/scanner. Don't print but save it to a file.

I have two loads of family photos. While my mum was very organised and labelled, I also realise that while I know of these people, I don't have any connection to them, my grandma and grandpa were 1 of 10 children each.

We scanned ourselves, we bought a scanner during Covid and already tackled our own photos, and so far we went through one side of my family. We kept eveything relating to my mum's childhood and her parents as I plan to track down some relatives and will offer the photos to them.

I binned most of my dad's landscape, building photos and just kept and scanned the ones with people I know and enjoy on them.

Thank you so much, everybody for your ideas. I certainly won’t be scanning any in because I don’t have a scanner and oh my God, I have ADHD need I say more😆
I am going to spend time going through them and identifying people and getting rid of the rest.

@goldfishleaving shit admin to the next gen is what I’m trying to avoid 😆

@EscapeTheCastle i’m absolutely intrigued that there is secondhand market for them!! That’s very interesting

Your phone has a scanner. Upload them to google photos and allow your wider family to enjoy them. 📷

Absolutely not a chance when I say there are two trunks I mean they are approximately 1.5 m long by 75 cm high and wide. They barely close. If anybody wants to enjoy these photos, they can have the hardcopies with my blessing.
I have all the photos I’ve need of my parents and grandparents and children

I’m trying not to be too emotional about it but some of them are very historical and lovely and those are the ones I would probably choose to keep but there are literally tens of thousands of photos😳😳

I’ve been bequeathed a box that I’m yet to go through but this has inspired me to - I honestly think the vast majority will be binned but i’ll keep the ones of people I know etc. I don’t need 7,500 photos of endless scenery that I can’t identify nor do I want them. I guess I’ll have to wait and see what I uncover.

We scanned those which were relevant and binned the rest. It took forever. There was also reams of papers, diaries,interviews, research etc into the family tree. Kept the one master copy and binned all that too.

When my parents died, they left a mountain of photos. I binned all that didn’t have people in, and of those, I binned duplicates or out of focus ones. So I was probably left with about 150 photos.

The idea is that they’ll get scanned to share with the family. The reality is that they’ll sit in my sister’s loft until she dies, then get binned.

I was just thinking about this myself. My 79 year old MIL has a whole room filled with photo albums practically dating from the advent of photography as its been a hobby in her family for generations, there are people we aren't sure who they are its from so long ago. I really have no idea what to do with them when she goes. I Suppose go though and save the best, share them out to other family members, digitise some and I suppose discard some. It feels like a crime to do so though but we simply don't have the space to keep everything and I don't want to pass the guilt on to our children either.

Bonfire. Seriously.

My Nan only left about 20 photos when she died. Her two children and her other grandchild didn't want them, but I did, so I've got her only photos. Her DD and other GGD are still alive, never asked to see them.
Every now and again I get the photos out and have shown them to my own DD when she asked about family a few years ago

Sorry I didn't say, keep what you'd like but do other the rest to existing family and even your own children if you have them.

🤣🤣🤣

This is what I intend to do, but there are thousands. So it’s a massive job

Shredding up old photos, using a good quality shredder is pure bliss 🥰
Not for recycling though.

@Nugg Your op is very well timed. I am currently clearing my parent’s property and I am bringing home all the photos. At some point I need to go through them all and decide what to do with them. I’ve realised it’s the photos of people that matter. I am hoping your thread will hold the answers.

@Kirschcherriesits a mammoth task and I find it as emotional as the other belongings tbh. I found a load of old passport photos of my mum at the weekend and as you’re not allowed to smile, she looks completely miserable🤣 but even they set me off crying because I just miss her so much💞🥺

@nopiesleftinthisvehiclenow that’s an idea!! Now I wish I had kept my mum‘s shredder!!

@Nugg I understand and know I will be the same.

first sort them - the views, zoos and generally anything that is anyone not in the family, get binned.

Then you make sure you know who is on the photos (write it on if necessary) then either get them digitised by someone else (front and back, high and low res) or invest in one of those fab photo scanners that does front and back, high and low res. Then when you have done all your photos, sell it?

Have you thought about giving your dad’s army stuff to a military museum? Try his regiment one first, and the Imperial War Museum would be worth a try too. Good luck

I went through mine a few years ago and got rid of a few like you described (zoo animals etc). Then I got rid of any that were too similar as I was finding I’d have an almost identical photo 5 plus times! No idea why as it was bloody expensive to print out pictures. Doing that I managed to prune it all down to around 4 albums. A house fire when I was a kid got rid of a lot of pics… 😢 Wouldn’t recommend that though.