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?

We've tried to compromise @MereDintofPandiculation , by getting big frames and making collages and hanging them on the wall, but still the hanging up of photos like bunting continues! Not just photos - birthday cards from years ago, cake decorations for Easter...stuff like that. It's very understandable and sad in a way, that a person with dementia just wants to live in the comfort of the past and familiar things, but a bit rough on the person who has to dust round it all!

'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.' 😂Sounds quite Warholesque!

@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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Do photo scanners work on negatives? I have found loads of very old ones and am interested in them. I may be making work for myself but I think I'd rather have some new pictures of my grandparents when young and even their parents, rather than a million shots of 'the sunset in Majorca'.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 😃

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.

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

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