As we work through the task of sorting photos, you will be faced with the challenge of what to do with the photos you don’t want anymore. Should you throw out old photos? It’s much easier to make those decisions when you are dealing with photos that you took and own. However, I have been working with my heritage photos the past few weeks and many of these photos date back to the early 1900’s. As I finish the sorting process, I am left with a small collection of photos that have no meaning to me that won’t be staying with my collection.
But now I’m left with a difficult decision that I don’t want to make lightly. My Grandma came through the depression, was a wartime bride and they raised their family in a small, war-time home on meager means. The photos she took and developed would have been carefully planned out and budgeted.
Do I throw these meaningless photos out?
I decided to seek out the advice of an expert; a photo organizer who specializes in this area.
Professional Genealogist, Deena Coutant, of DigiDeena Consulting had this to say…
“It is inevitable that we or our heirs may eventually arrive at a decision point where we have to downsize our photo collections. Just because we cannot keep all of the heritage photos doesn’t mean they must automatically be discarded. There are many viable options to donate or transfer ownership of groupings of photos that have historical or social relevance. Whether donating to a repository or posting digital copies of the photos online, there are numerous ways to make the photos accessible to others who may value them, while at the same time removing the burden to care for the collections ourselves.”
She also shared 10 possible solutions for me to consider that you can read more about in her blog post Photo Overflow.
I had no idea there were so many resources for re-purposing our old photos, and I’m so glad I asked. I have a solution {see #6 in Deena’s suggestions} and I’m ready to check my heritage photos off my list!
What about you? Will you be tossing those old photos or can you re-purpose them?
When Lisa Kurtz lost her mother, grandmother, aunt, and uncle in three years, she was left holding a box of unidentified photographs with nobody to ask about them. Lisa embarked on a lifelong quest to discover and preserve her mom’s story, for herself and her kids, which led her to a career in professional photo organizing. Today, Lisa is the Founder of Pix & TALES with her daughter and together they help busy moms manage their pictures and tell their family stories.
I’m very lucky that my family’s heritage photos have been sorted (and identified!) by previous generations. When I was going thru the big boxes of unsorted photos for my husband’s family, I found many from the 1940s and later that needed to be culled. Some envelopes were clearly the bad pictures – but still saved. Those are easy. Thanks for suggestions about what to do with those in-between “maybe somebody somewhere might want them” photos.
You’re welcome Kathy!
Thank you so much for all the information you share on this site. It has been immensely helpful! I am so happy that I did not discard photos of unidentified people as the organizer I worked with suggested. Over the past year, I was able to find many cousins, that I did not know existed, through ancestry.com and genealogybank.com. These cousins were very helpful in identifying very close family members in these photos. I started a Facebook group with these cousins who have been kind enough to share photos of immediate family (ie my father as a child) that I had never seen.
So glad you’ve found the info helpful and what a relief that you have been able to identify people in your photos. It often feels like you are putting together a giant puzzle with tiny pieces. Great idea to have a family facebook group to gather info and identify photos. Good luck as you continue!
My biggest challenge now that most photos have been identified, is to remove the photos from albums whose black pages are disintegrating and then what to do with the photos? Any suggestions? Albums are from 1930’s and 1940’s and the pages have some info in my mother’s handwriting.
Cathy, I suggest that you digitize the entire page to help preserve the order of photos, and the treasured handwriting of your mom. You can also digitize each individual photo if you want to add them to your overall collection. With your digitized pages, you could easily reproduce the album digitally in a photo book to keep the overall look and handwriting. For the decaying scrapbook, if you can remove the photos without causing damage to the photo, I suggest you do that. Then store the printed photos in an archive quality photo box, or in a archive quality photo album.
I have been able to identify many unlabeled photos with the Internet, and many written on the back in Croatian. I’ve identified a lot who I previously thought were not related at all, but found out they were. I’ve helped other genealogists identify their photos and share photos I have with them. I could have tossed the ones that were not important to me, but they were and are important to someone. And I have been helped by other researchers who didn’t know who their photos were of, and I did. I’m so glad they didn’t throw their photos out!!
I have had my parents old photos for years. There were several people who were unidentified until recently. After joining Ancestry and getting my DNA results, I’ve been able to match these people with photos posted by 3rd and 4th cousins. I now treasure these photos as they are close relatives who I never knew.