Old photos - what do you do with them?

We keep them in an old cigar box, just as they are and part of their charm.

I have ditched old photos of ancient family members who I don’t know.

If I don’t do it, it will be another load of stuff that the AC will skip in time to come.

I’ve done the same as Calendargirl - my outlaws seemed to take holiday photographs of everyone and everything they saw! We inherited bags and bags of them, so in Covid, with DH’s approval, I got rid of hundreds of photographs - DH’s sister didn’t want them either.

I have got rid of the ones of people I don’t know and the rest are in albums and mainly labelled. I have far too many albums and every so often I will bring one out and put it on the coffee table and then if anyone who comes wants to browse they are free to do so. They make good conversation starters.

I inherited several albums full of my folks’ foreign holiday photos from the 70s and 80s. One job that’s still waiting after many years, is to go through them, retrieve any worth keeping, and chuck probably 99%. I didn’t have the heart to do it at the time.

OTOH a year or two before he died, my father went through a load of very old B&W photos, mostly taken when he was a child (born 1916).

He put a selection in an album, with often amusing captions underneath, to say where and who they were. E.g. ‘Isle of Wight, Grandma X and Great Aunt Edna dressed in the fashion of staid ladies of their day.’
There were also photos of a farm where he’d stayed as a child, one showing a magnificent heavy farm horse all tarted up for a show. He had even remembered its name - Boxer.

We were all so glad he’d taken the trouble, otherwise I’m sure they’d nearly all have been binned. Plus some of the info was very helpful to family members doing family history research.

I inherited many family photos. Any with living relatives I passed on. Some others are very old and interesting for the fashion. I have passed these on to the local university textiles dept . Also have lots of railway/train photos. I am hoping DGS might take them to his university rail travel club! Makes me sad to see boxes of unloved unwanted photos at antique fairs .

Ours have been severely pruned over the years and are now in albums, annotated as far as we can. Just the two albums so may be of interest to our AC but not too much to dispose of.

The worst present ever was a jigsaw made up of a collage of photos of DD’s family. 1000 pieces to do, and then what do you do with it? Maybe frame it, but that just puts off the moment when those dear faces go into the recycling. It wouldn’t be of interest as a jigsaw to anyone else. She had it made as a thoughtful present for my mum, but it has just sat in her wardrobe for years now.

Surprisingly, my DH is interested in the old family photos.

Someone putting names on back is helpful, to say the least.

Just before Christmas I put a huge stack of old photographs in a storage box .
I don't know the names of some of the people.
It was something that I needed to do before I lost my parents.
It's a thought - don't delay.

fancythat

Surprisingly, my DH is interested in the old family photos.

Someone putting names on back is helpful, to say the least.

Yes, we’ve done this, and the date where possible.

I also got rid of the people I don't know.I did think while I was doing it, that everyone has photos of everyone else, so another family might be chucking out photos that had YOUR parents on, that you would have love to have seen, and we are doing the same to theirs. It's a shame but it has to be done, as previous posters have said, less for others to sort out after you've gone, or who's children also might keep a photo for sentimental reasons, not realising it was a next door neighbour of someone's Auntie and nothing to do with them or us AT ALL !!!!
I've got a huge box full of family photos , my husband can't see the point, he thinks we should just have them all on a memory stick as we have with the more modern photos. However, although I don't get the photos out often, they are a comfort and a joy when I do look at them.

I don't own a lot of ancestors' photos, to begin with, and those that I have are all of those I knew. The most damaged or faded ones have been digitized and colorized or repaired. I used a program called Photoglory but most photo shops have this service provided as well. The original have been discarded since then as there was no reason to keep them, and the ones that are in a more or less good condition are kept in albums.

Write the name of the person or place featured in the relevant ones and throw the rest away.

In the future when a family member is doing their family tree knowing who or where is very interesting, I have just a couple of my grandparents and none of the generation before.

My mam burned the lot! I’ve no photos of me when I was young. No school photos etc. All gone.

Oh no.

That is sad.