Question Of The Day, Friday, March 28

Good morning! And Happy Friday!

It's been a long week and I'm ready for the weekend. And since we'll be going into April, I'm ready to leave March behind. Goodbye to the wind and to the cold!

What do you do with your pictures? What do you do with really old pictures? Do you keep them in a box(es)? Toss them? Give them to relatives? How do you deal with pictures?

We have a ton of old pictures, of relatives long deceased, of people we don't even know. And there's nobody around to tell us who these people might be. Boxes of pictures. My sister doesn't want them, my brother certainly won't take them. I highly doubt our son would want them. He'd probably just toss them. But it doesn't seem right to just throw them away.

What do you do with yours?

A few years ago, my brother and I went through our parents’ old photo albums, removed all of the ones where we knew the people, and had those scanned. We tossed the others. The photos date back to about 1920. We put them on a Sony photo frame so Mom could see them. When she died last year, I brought the Sony home with me and see the pictures every day now. Sometimes I feel sad when I see the pics of Mom and Dad, but I’m glad to have them.

My own photos from the pre-digital age are stuffed in a box in a closet.

I have several thousands of photos, especially slides (the ones you project on the screen). All the thousands printed photos and their negatives are safely stored in several albums.
The nearly 25,000 slides are in special cases!

We've got old photos in some albums and envelopes and hardly ever look at them. What we should do is go through them with our nieces and nephews, write a short history on the back of each one, and see who wants what.

New photos I just store on the computer. Old photos of us as kids are still in the photo albums, but I scan some onto the computer once in a while and keep on a hard drive. I need to scan the pics of my childhood cats and post on here one of these days.

When my dad died and mom moved into assisted living I took all her boxes of photos home and spent a whole winter putting them in order in albums. There were also so many vacation pictures, photos of people i had no idea who they were, etc., those were tossed, though it pained me. But it was just too many. I mixed the photos I already had in too. Pictures that just had my brothers and sister in them I sent to them, along with some group family photos. I also put a small album together for each of my kids. It took a long time, but is SO much easier to look at. My brother then took my albums and scanned them to put them on digital. Make sure you ask several older relatives,or mail them copies to see if you can ID anyone first,before throwing them away. So many pictures meant so much to my folks, I'm sure, but they meant nothing to future generations. Every one, MAKE SURE you have a date on your photos and write on the back any names or info you know, trying to rely on memory years later just does not work. It is so much easier now to label, etc, in the digital age if you do it right away!

~ I keep them to look at sometimes when I feel like "visiting " with those no longer in this life. It's nostalgic , sad and pleasing all at once .

Winchester said:

Good morning! And Happy Friday!

It's been a long week and I'm ready for the weekend. And since we'll be going into April, I'm ready to leave March behind. Goodbye to the wind and to the cold!

What do you do with your pictures? What do you do with really old pictures? Do you keep them in a box(es)? Toss them? Give them to relatives? How do you deal with pictures?

We have a ton of old pictures, of relatives long deceased, of people we don't even know. And there's nobody around to tell us who these people might be. Boxes of pictures. My sister doesn't want them, my brother certainly won't take them. I highly doubt our son would want them. He'd probably just toss them. But it doesn't seem right to just throw them away.

What do you do with yours?

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Ugh, don't remind me of this! I have thousands of photos, in boxes, in albums, on the computer. It's a project to deal with 'someday.'

We have some in boxes mostly. About 10 years ago my Grandparents on my mother's side had us all go through their pictures (my Grandpa loved to take pictures!) and take what we wanted. So I have pictures of my Great-Grandparents and pictures of my Grandparents as a young couple; up through parts of my childhood. Most are in a photo box but some are in albums. My mother has my Grandpa's military scrapbook and a friend of hers scanned all the photos and made them into a slideshow on DVD. Grandpa really enjoyed watching that.

My MIL spent some time converting slides into digital photos and scanning photos. She put them all on disks for us and since her mother was still alive at the time we have some information on who the people are. Some of those photos predate my own ancestors arrival in the US! I love looking at old photos and looking for family resemblances and things.

My other Grandfather was very much into photography and there are boxes and boxes of slides in his old office. My cousin and I will get those out and look at them in the basement. Some are from our childhood but many are other relatives or from places he traveled (nothing super exotic although I know there are some from Italy that I would love to see). I'd love to convert those to digital to preserve his work; but I don't even live in the same state to volunteer myself for that project. Maybe my Dad will when he retires in a few years.

maggiedemi said:

New photos I just store on the computer. Old photos of us as kids are still in the photo albums

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I do the same, i.e. new photos on the computer and old ones from my childhood or my children's childhood are in photo albums. However, I have hundreds of pics in the original envelopes. I have returned all the ones my sister sent to our parents after they passed away. I can't bring myself to throw any out so I keep finding new places to store them.

My sister is the keeper of all the family photos from years gone by. I would love to get hold of some of them to scan and digitize but every time I ask for them she says she can't even find them - buried somewhere in the basement, whatever.

I have a few boxes of my own stuff up in the attic, which really need to be brought down again so I can start scanning them.

All else has been via digital means for many years and if in the past oh let's say 5 years or so are up in the "cloud" so easily found. I do keep duplicates on my computer/laptop/cell phone and I use Flickr as a repository to show off many of them too.

I inherited all the family photos, thousands of them. Many are over 150 years old. My father worked for a newspaper, fortunately, and knew the importance of documenting everything, so most of the old pics are identified. I wrote names on the backs of newer pics (in pencil so ink wouldn't bleed through). I hope to put these in scrapbooks and explain who these people were for my sons.

The photos my husband and I took are in boxes. There are too many to scan and unfortunately, the color has shifted in some of them. I really don't know what to do with these. Digital photos are still on my computer.

i upload digital photos to a website to store. I have no old photos, or family pics.

JamesCalifornia said:

~ I keep them to look at sometimes when I feel like "visiting " with those no longer in this life. It's nostalgic , sad and pleasing all at once .

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What a beautiful thing to say.

Some are framed, some in boxes. Should probably do something else with the ones in boxes.

Some are framed, some in boxes. Should probably do something else with the ones in boxes.

I import them to my phone though some of my favourites are framed or printed out in digital form. I have photos of my friends and family and I on a clipboard for my room at university, which I'll be moving into in September.
My baby and childhood photos are all printed out and in different folders.

I have literally hundreds of slides and b/w prints going back to the 60s when I was in the service. There are hundreds more taken in the time since, until I finally went digital. I am one of those people who kept notebooks of the subject and date, and frame number for the prints. I still have the negatives, and want to get one of those devices that will scan negatives, prints, or slides and put them onto SD cards, and then give the originals to family or friends for them to keep, if they want.

Ignore them and hope they go away.

Several years ago I got on a kick where I thought each of our 6 kids should have a copy of every photo they're in. So I printed duplicates of the photos, looked up the date, wrote it on the back, and filed it in the appropriate child's photo box.

Now I'm just trying to go through each year's photos and rename by date and who's in the photos. I'm up to 2010.

I also have a giant box of photos from my grandma's house that my mom gave me to sort through (thanks mom).

I'm going through KonMari and NOT looking forward to getting to that step.

I don't know what to with them nowadays. If I print them, I'm afraid I'll lose them so I have several copies or literally thousands or pictures on different devices just in case. Maybe when I buy a house, I'll select really memorable ones and frame them for everyone to enjoy when they come over. Or when it's been a hard day and I come home and I need a reminder of the little beautiful things.