What to Do with Old Wedding Albums: Keep, Scan, or Toss?

It’s June, which means Wedding Season has arrived! Does anyone else have an 11lb wedding album? I actually weighed mine and it’s 11 pounds. I’m fairly sure today’s newlyweds have slimmer, lower profile, digitally-created wedding albums. Something more in the 1lb range. I have been happily married for almost 29 years and I do heave out that heavy album on occasion, as do my daughters. But damn, it’s a lot of effort.

My parents’ wedding album is way smaller and not heavy at all. But the pictures aren’t great. They weren’t taken by a professional because my folks didn’t have the budget for that. Every photo has a blue cast to it, not great. We’ve taken the best shots out of the album and digitized them to improve the quality. I get questions all the time asking ‘what do I do with wedding albums?’ (also wedding dresses, but that’s another blog) My answer varies depending on the situation. Wedding albums (and the unions they document) tend to be emotionally loaded with both happy and sad/mad/angry feelings. I’m using this blog to explore some of the most common scenarios and how I would advise those facing each scenario.

Your Wedding Album (Happy Marriage Edition)

If you are happily married I’m guessing looking at your wedding album elicits positive emotions. When you take the time to look at it, that is. If you are like me, with an 11lb behemoth album, that may not be often. In fact, you may (like me) find yourself looking at the pictures of your wedding that are in digital form way more often than the album itself.

My advice is to keep the wedding albums that people actually look at (even if they are 11lbs.) But if no one ever pulls out your album to enjoy it then I would consider digitizing its contents and ditching the heavy album. This way you preserve the memories of the wedding while freeing up what in my case is an entire shelf’s worth of space.

Your Wedding Album (Divorce Edition)

But what if the wedding in the album ended in divorce? Then the answer is a little easier to come to. If no children came from the union and you don’t have happy feelings towards your ex, then toss the album. You don’t need a reminder of the bad juju in your home. I would tailor this advice slightly if there are kids involved. You may not care to revisit the memories of your wedding, but your kids might. For better or worse, your kids were born out of love and they might want to preserve those artifacts. You know your kids best, some will want the pictures and some won’t care. But in any case, it’s unlikely that they need the whole album preserved. Just one or two shots will do, and better if you digitize them.

Your Parents’ Wedding Album

Whether your parents’ marriage was a success or ended in divorce, their wedding album will likely end up in your hands. When it does, how you feel about it should dictate its fate. Albums are often large and cumbersome (did I mention mine is 11lbs?) or the pictures in them aren’t great (like my parents’ album.) If your parents divorced, maybe the memories are painful for you. Or maybe you’d like some evidence that they once loved each other and that’s ultimately how you came to be. The point is, let your feelings and not some feeling of obligation guide your decision about what to do. If your parents remarried, the same advice applies.

Scan For Posterity (and quality)

And once again, may I suggest selecting just a few photos from the wedding album and digitizing them? It’s so easy to do! You can use an app like TurboScan on your phone, the scanner on your home printer, or take them to a Kinkos/FedEx. Or if the wedding shots are just a few pictures in a much larger collection of prints you need to scan, my favorite Epson Photo Scanner is the best on the market. It does the job quickly, while improving photo quality (that wedding party photo is one of the blue-cast prints from my parents’ album – the quality was much improved in the scanned version!) and embedding photo date into the meta-data file.

Bottom line, if the wedding album in question is cherished, loved and looked at – keep it. If the photos in it make you feel good but the album itself is cumbersome, scan the photos and ditch the album. If you’d rather forget the wedding ever happened, toss the album and don’t look back! It’s not illegal to do so, I promise!