I have lots and lots of photos of my family and relatives. I have them stored every where and just when I think I have them organized I find more. My mom put a photo album together for my sisters and me, nothing frilly just the album covering. I just don't know what to do with them there is so many. Any ideas?
I understand your problem, but don't really have a solution. I hate to admit it, but most of mine are just sitting in boxes and I never look at them. One of these days I really need to start sorting through them to see which ones I need to put in albums and which are just junk that I don't need at all. Of course the family photos aren't likely to fall into the junk category but I've always taken a lot of photos just for the fun of it, and many of the ones that date back to the film days are really bad. Not that all my digital ones are much better, but at least they're not cluttering up the house.
Actually, I was going through my huge "collection" of photos the other day, and set out the ones that I liked and wanted to save, and scanned them into my computer. My computer has a lot more room to store photos than my antique sideboard does!! This way, I can look at them whenever I want, I can send them to people (in fact, my mother-in-law and aunt got a bunch the other day). And I know that they will never get lost and I don't have to be afraid of them degrading. You gotta love technology.
When it was not near as expensive as it is today I would buy duplicates with hopes of passing them on to other family members. I may still do that though.
You can just make copies of what you scanned into your computer and pass those on to family and friends no need to purchase duplicates anymore.
I remember my mom and dad taking out the old boxes of photographs from before I was born, and they would show them to me, and tell me who the people and places were. Now, my folks are long since passed away, and I have turned most of the old photos over to my children. The problem is, we have no idea who or where a lot of those old pictures were about any more. Some of the ones I can remember what my folks told me; but some of them, I can't. So, what we are trying to do now, is label all of those old-time photos, as we upload them to cloud storage that is accessible to everyone in the family to view, upload or download photos. I have about 400 pictures on my ipad, and I like to use them for the desktop pictures, or just to look at them. We have something called a Transporter that my oldest son set up, and then we can all put pictures in an account on there. The pictures are thumbnail size until you download them. I have been writing about the ones I remember of the old ones, and then putting them on my Flickr web albums. That way, at least they will have information about the family pictures, and should not end up like we are now, trying to identify pictures.
That's such a good idea. We forget that photos will be passed down from generation to generation, and while we may know everyone in the photos, our children do not. They don't know the stories behind the photographs. They don't remember our memories of these places, people and times. Our history is something we should cherish and do our best to pass on to future generations.
I have a drawer full of negatives that I'd love to have on digital, but I'll probably never get around to it, or be able to afford it.
Mal, I totally agree. So many times, I have looked at some of those old photo albums that my mom had put together, and wished that I knew who the other people in the photograph were, or where it was taken at. My son also asked me to write down what I can remember about when I was growing up,as well as some of the stories that were passed along to me from my folks. I decided that having a blog that I can add stories and pictures to might be the easiest way to do it and be able to share with the whole family; so that is what I have started doing. Whenever I think of a family story (like the one about Daddy's old shortwave radio, and the trip to the radio station) I write it in the blog, so gradually, at least some of the family history will be in there. After my folks died, and I was going thrugh their old pictures; there were just so many negatives, and even back then (1988) it was hard to find a place to develop some of the really old film because it needed a different process than the newer film did. I can imagine that now, it would be even harder to find a place to develop old negatives.
One of the things I would like to do with my mom who will be 90 this year is start a sort of book about her life, family other things she remembers, her memory is good at this time. I would include photos in this book, I have seen this type of memory book advertised in many places online, mostly with places that make final arrangements.
I'm not sure I'd be able to do a whole book, but it sounds like a great idea. I should at least try to go through old photos with my Mom so that I can learn more about her side of the family. I wish I'd done that with my Dad because I feel like I know so little about his side of the family, but it's too late now.
Of the ones that I have of my parents and their families, I have gone through and picked out a few personal favorites and sent a lot of them on to other family members and even a good many to mother's best friend from when they were kids. Though I am close to none of them, they all seemed to appreciate getting the pictures and the memories they held. No one in my immediate family would ever care to know who most of the people in the pictures are, so sending them on seemed a good idea. And having just a few is all I really need. Now...What to do with all the ones I have with my husband and I in them I just don't know as yet. I have yet to even consider sorting those.
When my heart was so bad, and I was going to go in for the operation; I thought it would be a good thing to get any of the old family pictures sorted out before i went in (just in case, you know), so I gave all of them that I had to my kids. It means that I don't have them to be able to scan them anymore; but eventually they will get the pictures all scanned into their computers, and then we can all share everything. There are still bunches of the old negatives; but I doubt that we will ever get any more of those developed, and probably would not know who they were now, even if we did get them developed. Some of the ones from the early 1920's when my folks were in California are just little ones only a couple of inches square. I don't know if my mom just got them printed in a small size to save money, or if that was the size they developed them back in those days.
My husband's boss has a scanner of film negatives that outputs a digital version of the photo. Some of our negatives were scanned and are now in our archive disk. But for old photos, we scan it one by one. It is a painstaking task particularly when the photo is pasted inside the album page. You just cannot detach it so as much as possible, we scan the photo without removing it from the album. For small albums, that will do but for large photo albums like wedding photos, scanning without removing is simply impossible.
My wife takes care of ours. Seriously, she has them all perfectly organized in several albums, and she rarely lets anyone touch them, despite showing them off to everyone visiting us. I don't think they'll be going anywhere with her guarding them like that.