What to do with old photos?

[Huston55]

Thx for the link to the scanning service. Has anyone used 'Legacy Box' and, if so, were you satisfied? How do you view/use your scanned photos?

My related question is, what about small memorabilia? These are items that are relatively small (book size or less), like concert tickets, fliers, badges, napkins, etc. whose nostalgic value is in the item itself. The only idea I've come up with so far is a set of archive boxes organized in some way. I'd be interested if others have tackled this in some inventive way.

 

[Earl E Retyre]

We scanned our pictures and set it to music. It is more fun to watch when they are set to music. We are not completely done with the project - but at this point, made 2 music videos and have 2 more to do. I used Movie Maker - totally free. With the money saved, I could buy dryer sheets for life.

 

[Walt34]

I finally fell into the "who cares?" camp after dealing with Dad's 8mm movies. He stopped taking the movies about 1963 or so, and stopped taking 35mm slides a few years after that. The youngest people in those movies are me and my sisters and we are all in our 60's.

This means that everyone else in those movies & slides is either in their 80's or dead, and ours is the last generation that will be able to put names on the people. After asking around, we found that no one wants the old photos showing people they don't know. Granted there is some passing academic interest in ancestors, but not enough to take custody of the photos.

A cousin a couple of years older than me agreed to take the 8mm movies, intending to have them digitized but frankly I don't expect to see that happen and really, I don't care if he does. We last looked at them about 15 years ago at a family gathering and no one has looked at them since.

So, following the mantra "If you haven't used it in the last year..." we clearly don't need those movies and slides. They served their purpose at the time, and that time has apparently gone.

 

[Car-Guy]

This means that everyone else in those movies & slides is either in their 80's or dead, and ours is the last generation that will be able to put names on the people. After asking around, we found that no one wants the old photos showing people they don't know. Granted there is some passing academic interest in ancestors, but not enough to take custody of the photos.

When my parents passed away I found a very large box full of old photos. All black and whites. Over about a month or so, I went through them all and tossed well over 95% of them. Probably about half of them, I didn't know (or recognize) anyone in the pictures. It was interesting to see pictures of mom and dad before I was born and my grandparents when they were relatively young. Really liked seeing some of the pictures of the cars they had back in those days and the houses they lived in.

 

[Bryan Barnfellow]

I have on my to do list digitizing of all printed photos and organization of everything. For me the photos nearly always bring an instant, rather detailed memory of when it was taken, where, who, etc. It's very satisfying. Given that my memory is failing overall a bit, I am organizing these into photo books that I can carry with me into senility with the hope that I will still remember how to turn a page.

-BB

 

[Midpack]

What software are people using to organize the photos once scanned?

I’m not using any software. All our pics are on our desktop PC in the “Pictures” folder with a bunch of sub folders to make whatever I want to see easy to find. The month and date are part of each file name, so I won’t forget when they were. And iCloud automatically updates our iPhones and iPads “Albums” using the same folder/sub folder file structure as our desktop. It couldn’t be slicker IMO, and there’s almost no chance we could lose them altogether since the pictures are in 4 places.

 

[mpeirce]

Sell the ones you don't want to keep on ebay. I'm serious-there is a nice market for vintage photos, especially any Army, Navy, etc. WW2 shots, and those with cars or trucks in them. Trains and tourist shots are also popular. The older, the better.

Plain old OLD TRUCKS too.

My DF was in the road construction business and now makes a tidy sum buying and selling nice photos of things like 1947 Mack trucks or '55 bulldozers. Not only does he make a few bucks, but he gets to talk with people who love old equipment like he does.

 

[RunningBum]

Inspired by this thread, I've pulled out a shoebox full of photos and have gone through half the box. I've saved maybe one out of every 50. Many of them are bad vacation photos, or pictures including my ex-, inside and out of houses we lived in, and so on. So it may just be that this box is from a time I don't care to preserve much of, but I would say that before sending off boxes to be scanned, you'll want to skim through them first to see what you really want to save. It might not take that much effort to scan them yourself, or just take digital photos of them.

 

[Car-Guy]

What software are people using to organize the photos once scanned?

Each photo becomes an individual file once scanned. Create some folders with names you like (e.g. vacation 73, vacation 81, old house, new house, cars, dogs, etc) Then drop the related files in the appropriate folders. Pretty easy and low cost (free) which folks around here will like.

Reminder, your might want to take a few minutes and backup all the files/folders (once sorted) to your favorite media (USB stick or external HD or cloud, etc) and you are done.

 

[aja8888]

A true story:

In 1976 when my ex-wife and I were at our wedding reception, an old aunt of my new wife to be walked up to us and gave us an old photo album. This album was about 3” thick and very fancy old leather bound, with designs all over it. She said it was photos of family and wanted to pass it along. We thanked her for it and put it aside to look at later.

Weeks passed and we were sending out thank you notes and remembered that gift of the photo album. We dug it out and looked at it and it was loaded with pictures (probably 30), each framed on a single page, of men, women and children in old period clothing (late 1800’s - early 1900’s) that you would expect to be worn at the family photo shoots. Men in top hats, women in white dresses with lace all over. No one smiling, all standing like they were at attention in the Army.

The thing that we realized is that we didn’t know or recognize anyone in the photos! Ok we, thought, this was my wife’s family on her mother’s side and they were are from upper Michigan and had worked in the early auto industry times. Some were farmers and also fishermen. So we put the album aside agreeing to investigate it at the next opportunity. That never happened.

Moving along about 30 years, we are divorced and ex wife passes away living in Texas where we live now. Our daughter and I have the task of cleaning out her home and belongings. We find the old album. My daughter starts looking through it and slides a photo out the its holder and low and behold, on the back of the photo is written in pencil, the names of the people and the date of the photo! Wow!! But, who are these folks? My daughter was too young to have met any of them or their offspring. I certainly didn’t recognize anyone. My ex MIL and FIL were dead too so we couldn’t ask them for help. We decided to call my ex’s older brother Bill that was living in North Carolina (Bill and I were still good friends) and see what he thought.

So we called Uncle Bill and told him of the album and I scanned a few pictures and e-mailed them to him. He called and was elated as we had some of the missing links to the family tree that he and some others were trying to put together! I scanned the rest of the photos, front and back and e-mailed them to him. My daughter has the album in her safe keeping.

 

[Katsmeow]

On why pay a service rather than scan at home - We have a good scanner. But, we had a lot of photos to get scanned and it would have taken a lot of time to scan them myself and do the cleaning up the service did (not major editing just a little clean up). The cost we spent to have them scanned was for me an excellent value as compared to the time it would have taken me to do it myself.

Software used to manage them -- I use Photoshop Elements. The newest version Photoshop Elements 2018 was just released last week.

 

[imoldernu]

Besides the 30,000 jpg's etc. on my computer, perhaps 200 lbs of family photo's going back to the mid 1870's, but mostly my mom's "Brownie 6-20" pics from 1936 to 1990. Musta driven my dad crazy, as she'd go thru a few rolls of film every month... $$$ when dad's wages were much less than $1.00/hr.

The old pictures are fine, but the glossy snapshots are all curled, and there isn't enough time left to fix, even if I wanted to. Kids are very interested in the old photos... for about 15 minutes.

So, yeah... who cares?

On the right... My mom (large umbrella) Grandma and Grandpa Miller. Probably about 1923...

 

[meierlde]

In particular black and white prints to 100+ years old are still good, color prints from the 1970s have faded colors. Old slide film from the 1950s (kodachrome and etkachrome) is still ok however.

 

[GrayHare]

Of the couple hundred family photos I have I've written on their back the name(s) of people, the location, and approximate date. Perhaps that will help keep these photos relevant to the next person who inherits them.

 

[gayl]

I'm another one of those with tons of old photos. What I did was I made a collage of my mother's pictures of her growing up, my father's pictures of him growing up, and 2 of my kids (there were a lot of them) use it instead of paintings in the living and family rooms.

Still I have about 5 floppies of pictures, two CDs of pictures, and one flash drive. Does anybody have any idea how I can get all of these put on to just one flash drive? I can't even view the ones on the floppies or CDs anymore as I don't have a disk drive on my laptop.

The albums on my phone are separated into trips and family members. So that's fairly well organized. It's the other stuff that's a mess

I really like this idea & I would like to incorporate all of the pictures onto it

We have several digital picture frames so we can display our favorite photos. Why keep a photo if you are never going to look at it.

 

[meierlde]

For 3.5 inch floppies a usb floppy drive should cost about $20. Just search for usb floppy drive.

 

[Walt34]

Still I have about 5 floppies of pictures, two CDs of pictures, and one flash drive. Does anybody have any idea how I can get all of these put on to just one flash drive? I can't even view the ones on the floppies or CDs anymore as I don't have a disk drive on my laptop.

For 3.5 inch floppies a usb floppy drive should cost about $20. Just search for usb floppy drive.

Exactly. Lots of them on Amazon, CD drives too if you look for them:

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_...rch-alias=aps&field-keywords=USB+Floppy+drive

 

[imoldernu]

usb dvd/cd drive
https://www.walmart.com/ip/NEW-Slim-Portable-USB-2-0-External-Optical-DVD-RW-CD-RW-Burner-Writer-Drive-US/898787428?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=7787&adid=22222222227073278463&wmlspartner=wmtlabs&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=c&wl3=184886931262&wl4=pla-287709915286&wl5=9021973&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=115070522&wl11=online&wl12=898787428&wl13=&veh=sem

 

[gayl]

THANK YOU! Will be a project when I get home in November

 

[albireo13]

do youknow how much time it takes to scan all those photos?

A retirement project ...

 

[Scrapr]

do youknow how much time it takes to scan all those photos?

A retirement project ...

Look in the "What did you do all day" thread?

j/k. Could not resist. I have no earthly idea.

I put a slide show for my FIL funeral. About 55-60 pictures. Took about 10 hours. But I had to ID people, etc. Put together a little show. There were a ton of picture books

 

[Jerry1]

DW has been scanning pictures for weeks (maybe months) now. She watches TV and scans pictures. I have no idea what, if any, method there is to her madness. I have no idea when it will end. I tried to talk her into giving the job to grandson but she didn't even listen to that for a second.

I will say, however, that while I'm generally in the camp of not caring, once in digital form, pictures are very easy to scan through and usually the memories or enjoyable. For example, when our dog of 15 years died, I was looking for a good/special picture of her. By the time I found it, I had relived her growing up and old. I was glad DW had the pictures. Will I sit down with a physical album? Probably not. But once scanned, probably.

Oh yeah, the picture of my first Grand National was cool to see. That dated back to 1988.

 

[Idnar7]

I was the little kid that always had a kodak with him taking pictures that interested me. I then inherited all my grandmother's and father's slides and movies. Easy to edit slides by throwing away. 95% of my gma's were flowers and sunsets. Movies cannot be easily edited. I had scanned unto cd and not have looked at since. I made copies for my daughters, so no need to pass down. We made the usual "memory" boards for my DM and DF services. Taking that as inspiration, we made memory boards of the almost 70 years we have shared a family cabin. We put them up on the walls of the cabin and it is a great way to provide a family history. Family members from out of town especially enjoy viewing them when visiting. We documented the past and it will be easy for our children to carry on for the future. Now the boards cover 4 or 5 generations, all tied to our common family meeting place.

 

[RunningBum]

do youknow how much time it takes to scan all those photos?

A retirement project ...

Nobody else has picked up on my idea of taking pictures rather than scanning. I just tried both and I like how the picture came out better than the scan, and it is quicker.

edit: sorry for the flipped images, I rotated and saved them but for some reason it reverted to original when I attached them. It's only to give you an idea of clarity. Scanned is sidewise, picture is upside down. I just used my Moto G4plus phone. My scanner is an inexpensive Brother 4in1. If it's important to preserve them very well it would be good to invest in a good camera or scanner. I think this is going to be good enough for me. A lot of my pictures are imperfect already anyway.

 

[mpeirce]

Nobody else has picked up on my idea of taking pictures rather than scanning. I just tried both and I like how the picture came out better than the scan, and it is quicker.

Taking a photo of paper documents is better than scanning these days too. The phone cameras have gotten very good and the apps are smart enough to identify the edges of the paper and turn a skewed image into a nice rectangular one. Then they'll toss the result into your favorite cloud storage service if you want.

Scanner Pro, ScanBot, Scanner+ are good. And iOS 11 added all this functionality into the Notes app.

This got my wife to stop collecting paper receipts.