What would you do with photographs?

[AInightingale]

Clearing my mum's house (she's in assisted living) out slowly, and now I've reached the really personal stuff- albums of photos and mountains of old stray ones in envelopes, some dating back to the early 20th century.

Obviously I will keep their wedding album and baby/grandchild photos, but what about the rest? My parents took loads of holidays and there are MILLIONS of pictures of camels, cruise ships, exotic places etc. Also tonnes of pictures of my dad with his mates messing about in boats and stuff like that.

While I want to keep mementos of my parents' lives, I also want to seriously downsize this hoard. WWYD with it all? Thinking of scanning the historical ones to create a digital record, and frankly dumping a lot of the holiday stuff. Does that seem too harsh? I want to give my mother one or two albums but that's all. Are there any apps where you can make family trees etc, has anyone been in this position?

Good luck OP I think your ideas sound a good compromise. I was lucky in that my DM had sorted family photographs into a semblance of order before she died. My sister has the majority I wasn’t really interested in having them. A few photographs that might have interested me my DM had thrown out! My DH still has hundreds of photographs belonging to his late parents I doubt he will ever go through them. It took us over six months to clear his late parents house they were terrible hoarders. My late grandmother had an Aunt who was on the stage in a vaudeville act in the USA. My grandmother had some sort of argument with her and destroyed all the photos of her performing on stage. I really wish I had seen those.

Yes, I think photographs from the 1900s - early 20th C are interesting for their own sake, there were far fewer taken. I do want them on a memory stick. But whenever people got Kodaks, personal and digital cameras etc they just went mad snapping everything.

While your mum still has the capacity, go through with her the ones of family and write on the back who they are - if you are planning on passing any of this down to children this is very helpful to put names to faces and spot family resemblances etc.

You don't need to go mad, just a couple of grandparents, great grandparents etc.

Keep wedding photos, ( esp whole family ones) a couple of school/ baby photos and then seriously - bin the rest that has no emotional resonance for you.

Your children won't have to do this for you so much as everything is digital now but it is nice for them to have a visual who's who of their family tree.

My mum is in her 70s and is starting to do this now , as I have explained that I'll be sending the whole lot bar one sentimental box to the skip once she's gone. She's quite on board with this and now has regular 'clear outs' of all her belongings.

Yes, cine film also nowhere to be found here, too.

After my last parent died, I went through the photos very ruthlessly at first, all ones of scenery on holiday went in the bin. Then I went through ones with people in - if I had no clue who the people were, they were binned. Then I threw out duplicates or nearly identical photos, which left a manageable amount. I will probably scan them and make them into a photo book (I also see no point in having photos on a computer). I have an album of my Mum's from the late 1940s and early 1950s, and she had added captions to the photos. I love that!

My mum had a lot of very old family photos of both her and her mothers childhoods. Some even older photos. Before she died, she put them into an album and wrote underneath each photo who was in it. If she had not done this, I would not know that I have a photograph of my maternal great grandmother at aged 14, for example. Or a photo of my great grandparents wedding day. If possible, I would take the old photos to your mum and ask her who the people are, put them in an actual, physical album and write underneath each picture who is featured in the photo. Maybe even what your mums knows about it. You may well find that you develop an interest in your ancestors later on in life or perhaps another family member will. These are precious family photographs.

You could do the same with some of the more recent ones but it’s more likely that you’ll know yourself who features in them so you could probably make the album up yourself.

You could also digitise as a back up (or upload them somewhere like Facebook) but IME a physical photo or album lasts longer; it doesn’t get lost in a soft/hardware update.

I binned most, kept about ten that I liked and recognised.

Names should always be written on the back of photos! The number my mum has of strangers with a question mark on the back - that's really helpful. 🙄

I agree with filtering and keeping the best ones. Maybe one per holiday if the quantity is overwhelming. Scan or photograph them, and keep the originals. From a family history perspective please please write on the back who the people are then the year or your best guess at a year. It's so frustrating to come across a picture and have no idea who the people are, or what wedding/birthday party it was taken at. And obviously write "Bill and Jan 1984, York" or whatever, rather than "mum and dad on holiday".

Genealogists love nothing more than to come across an album of photographs. Good luck with your sorting.

I was going to offer my gran's to the local record office... I'll see what they say. We have a lot of photos and boxes of slides which illustrate a certain period of history. If they aren't interested, I'll probably take them to the tip but it feels wrong. It also feels wrong to make them my children's responsibility to dispose of.

Your hour a week of cleaning should not trump your mums right to put what she wants in her own surroundings.

I fired up my phone to record video, then got my Mum to go through the album of old family photos and talk me through who was who etc. So the camera shows the photo with a voiceover from her.

I have a Chromecast attached to my TV, and when it's not playing stuff it shows photos from my Google Photos albums - which includes an album of digitised slides from 50-60 years ago.

I would argue that putting photos in a Google Photos album or even a big external hard drive or usb stick is a good compromise - typically grandchildren etc develop an interest in their forebears when they get older, so just because they don't care now doesn't mean they won't enjoy seeing them later. And digital is so much more compact !

The videos of her talking me through her old family photos - absolutely priceless. Definitely recommend that.

This is such a lovely idea - I think I will suggest this for my MIL.

I had to do this after Mum died. Not mountains of photos, but plenty.

First I sorted them into ones with people I recognised and ones without, and chucked all the ‘without’ ones. (This included a quantity of tiny B&W ones with a human the size of a matchstick head who could have been absolutely anyone, blurry faded ones etc).

Then I sorted them into piles of individuals vs groups.

Individuals into individual people. Kept a few for each person, chucked the rest.

By now I was on a roll and able to be ruthless with the group ones.

Finally went back and wrote the name of the people in the photo/event/location/date as far as I knew on the back of each one.

Threw away loads. It felt good. Haven’t looked at them since mind.

Had the same problem when my DM passed. Hundreds, and I mean hundreds, of photos. I went through every single one (had more time on my hands then!) and sent ones to her friends, and various family members who were IN the photos. The generic scenery ones I had to throw away. I kept a lot - of me and my siblings etc. I whittled it all down to one suitcase which is on top of my wardrobe and will be MY DCs problem ! But a PP is right - these were my DMs memories, not mine. I guess the same could be said of my huge hoard of photos when my DC have to decide what to do with them. And the suitcase !!

Throw them out!
She'll never know.
I hate useless clutter

When my Mum died we had dozens of albums to go through. My siblings and I took out ones of us and our children and we went through the rest.
We discarded holiday scenes with noone in / chopped off heads etc. There were a lot of chopped off heads bless her.
The rest we stored in one of these, each section holds 100 photos. So we still have lots of pictures but they are organised and far more manageable to store than the mountain of albums.
Photo storage

Oh sorry I see Moltenlasagne has already suggested this.

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.

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.

That seems so heartless to me

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

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.

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.

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!