What to Do with All Those Old Family Photos

If you are of a certain age, you probably have a lot of old family photos lying around your home. In today’s world of instant, super-high-quality digital shots it seems weird that we used to eagerly pick up our developed film (complete with doubles!) and take the photos home where they may have made it into an album (but more likely a box) which was eventually stowed away in a closet. 

Fast forward several decades and you’ve also inherited all of your parents’ photos. There are also potentially pictures and albums your grandparents left with your parents. Maybe there are a few from your great-grandparents’ generation but photos were both formal and expensive in those days so thankfully there weren’t many to pass on. Which is good, because you are drowning in all of these prints!

You have a healthy respect for your parents and generally enjoy looking at pictures, but frankly you don’t have room for this detritus of family history. And it isn’t digestible in its current state. So what to do?

What to do first

The first thing to do is edit those old family photos down to a reasonable amount. Even if you organize what you have, it’s likely there are so many that it will never feel easy and fun to look at them.

If you need to pare down an enormous number of prints, I recommend taking an inside-out approach. Instead of going through and evaluating every single photo as a potential edit, move quickly through a stack or an album to scan for any you’d like to keep. In the olden days the quality of photos was low and people tended to use a whole role of film at a single event. So you could keep one or two shots from your 1st birthday, but not all of them. Anything blurry automatically goes. Ditto pictures with people you don’t know or care about. Scenery shots, toss. You don’t need to look at each one of these pictures and make a decision – the object is to have a small stack of keeps and a trash can (because you can’t recycle photos) full of edits when you’re done.

If you have lots of old albums you don’t need to keep them to salvage the photos you want. You can use palette knives like these to remove all but the most stubbornly-glued photos from the albums. Once you have your few favorites, the 7 pound album can go in the trash.

One other easy edit – your negatives! They deteriorated over time and you can get a much-improved version of the printed photo via scanning. So please toss the thousands of negatives collected over multiple generations – they are now obsolete!

Now you’ve got it down to the good ones

I acknowledge that the job of editing is intimidating and can take time. That’s okay! Take it slow, one stack/album at a time. Just a few minutes a day can move you pretty quickly through a large number of old family photos – especially if you are working inside-out!

But when you are finally finished and are left with a reasonable number of photos, it’s time to digitize. Now, you may be against the idea of digitizing because you like your physical prints. GREAT. You can stop here! But if you want to be able to enjoy your older pictures with the rest of your digital photos it’s best to scan them.

You have several options for scanning your prints. If you don’t have a lot you can use the scanner on your printer or even an app on your phone to scan them one at a time. This is the cheapest option but you have to go one photo at a time and you won’t have date info embedded in your digital file.

If you have a lot of photos you would do well to consider a couple of other avenues to scan your prints. The first option is to pay someone to scan for you. Companies like Legacybox and YesVideo (and Method Seattle!) will scan your prints for you if you send them in. Rates vary and many folks are uncomfortable with the thought of sending their pictures out into the void. Another solution is to invest in a high-speed photo scanner. This one from Epson is the best on the market. It’s pricey but you get a lot of bang for your buck, including speed, improved quality and the ability to embed date into the digital files. You can scan other items as well, but the scanner is specifically designed  and optimized for photos.

How to enjoy the digital versions

Okay, now you have your old family photos digitized. So what? Are they forever lost in the black hole of files on your computer? How can I enjoy them if they aren’t in albums? Well, I have some suggestions to help you enjoy your pictures for years to come and preserve them for your kids and grandkids as well.

My very favorite way to get the most out of your newly-digitized treasures is to put them in a digital frame. When you have a digital frame, you have almost unlimited capacity for the decades’ worth of photos you’ve just scanned. I can’t fully explain the feeling of delight that a digital frame will bring you. First, it’s a rotating slide show that will surprise you with memories on a daily basis. Second, it eliminates the need for a cluttery display of mismatched frames. Third, you can keep adding new photos to it as time goes by.

I’ve given so many of these frames as gifts and they get rave reviews every time. You will be hailed as a superstar if you digitized the pictures you got from your parents and loaded them onto a digital frame. Seriously! The best digital frame out there is this one from Aura. I’ve heard stories about some other brands with membership fees, limited storage capacity and glitchy interfaces. Aura has none of this nonsense in their product.

There are other ideas beyond the frame. If you like to hold something physical you can easily create albums that take up about a fifth of the space of the old bulky ones. I use Shutterfly because it’s easy and they allow the most number of pages per album. You can create a slideshow and set it to music. When you have a special occasion to celebrate like a milestone birthday, anniversary or celebration of life your digitized photos come in really handy! And finally, you can upload them to a cloud service (I recommend Amazon Photos) and have them handy whenever you want to look at them via the Amazon Photos app.

Now sit back and enjoy

And what about the prints you kept? Should you still keep them? If you like having the physical copies, absolutely! If not, you can toss them knowing you could always order a print for practically nothing if you needed it.
As you can probably tell, I’m passionate about the topic of pictures. I think they are the best way to preserve the memories of our lives and deserve our attention. I have a lot of this info and more in my Free Photo Organizing Checklist, you can get it here. Get ready to sit back and enjoy enjoying your life’s memories, the clutter-free way!