2025, Family, home, Technology, Uncategorized

Photo Finish

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One benefit of moving is the chance to go through things and decide what is good to keep and what is good to go. I spent part of Saturday going through a closet in the guest bedroom that has all our photo albums in it. That was a daunting task.

I am the photographer in the family. Over the years we have kept, organized in albums, most of the many photos I took during our early marriage and of the children as they grew up. We also acquired Husband’s family photos that included photos of his childhood as well as old family photos from early 20th century. We got a lot of those after Husband’s father died. I have my own old family photos organized in another part of the house.

I found I still have the scrapbooks my mother put together of a trip to Europe I took as a high school senior with America’s Youth In Concert in 1976, and my years at Concordia. I had forgotten we had those, since I shoved them in our closet after my parents died 11 years ago. I am glad I made an executive decision then to get rid of most of the volumes of my own baby pictures. I haven’t missed them at all.

The whole problem with the guest room closet is that we have been shoving things in there and forgetting about them. I got rid of empty photo albums and other useless things on Saturday. Why, I asked myself, do we have three pairs of binoculars? I didn’t have the energy to sort through the fifteen or so photo albums that remain. That will be done at our leisure after we move.

Snce the advent of smartphones I no longer use my camera. Those photos are in “the Cloud”. I will have to figure out how to digitize the photos in the albums I decide to keep. Our son assured me it is easily done. We shall see if that is so.

How do you store your pre-smartphone photos? Any Baboon scrapbookers?

37 thoughts on “Photo Finish”

  1. I confess! I confess!
    I haven’t destroyed any photos. The x took them all. I’ve no doubt many (of me) went in the trash bin.
    My sister is the family “Cloud.”

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  2. Much the way you do, Renee. We have an armoire filled with photo albums and loose pictures. I was also an avid slide photographer in my early marriage days, so we have a dozen or so full Kodak carousels of slides, mostly from vacations. They’ll all probably sit where they are until we possibly move to downsize. My wife talks about going through the albums about once a month, but doesn’t follow through. She’s not a hoarder, but she fears throwing anything away because she finds comfort in having things around her that have an emotional element to them. (One of her quirks that may evolve into a fault if we ever actually move out of this house.)

    Chris in Owatonna

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  4. I’m a scrapbooker. I have most of my physical photos already in albums, some downstairs and some upstairs. I have a small box in my studio that still has a few physical photos on it and I have two CDs with photos on it that my plan is to print and get into albums as well.

    When my father died, I made a scrapbook of his life for my mother. It’s in her will that the scrapbook comes back to me when she passes. It ended up being a hugely emotional project for me, mostly positive, and I referred to it as “scrapbook therapy” at the time. With that in mind, I have since collected a file folder of photos from my mother of her life and talked to her about some of her stories so that I can do scrapbook therapy again when her time is done.

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  5. I’ve been through some of my own photos, as well as the family photos that became mine when my mom passed away. There are a few albums and a medium-sized plastic storage bin full of photos in no particular order. I’m not good at that kind of organization, but I don’t want to throw them away yet.

    I agree that moving is a great time to look critically at things and decide what to keep. I donated lots of stuff yesterday.

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  6. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    At the beginning of COVID isolation, I started on my mother’s photos, which also included the photos of ALL of both sets of grandparents. When my paternal grandparents broke up their house, my parents were so broken-hearted that they never sorted the photos. My mother also had collected a lot of genealogy material that was just shoved into boxes. So I sorted all of that and reduced it to two bins. Then I scanned all of it, including the photos, into digital files which is not difficult once the sorting is done. It was a great COVID isolation activity. While doing this, I learned a lot about my family history, including the detail that the maternal Jacob Kline ( there is a different Jacob Klein on dad’s side) was active on the Underground Railroad. There was also a photo of a Civil War Reunion. More later

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    1. I am not a scrapbooker, but my sister was. She has since given it up. The organized photos and memorabilia does make a nice gift. She made a beautiful scrapbook of my son’s childhood. I appreciated the books she did for me, but I never wanted to take it up.

      I must start sorting through my stuff–those are the photos I think are extraneous, with a few exceptions. Someone asked who “would want the digitized versions?” I have given out many copies of the family history documents that I digitized. One data stick is much less to store than all the pictures and documents. So I think the answer is, future family might want to look at them. Ancestry.com makes a lot of money on that stuff.

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      1. PS, I have noticed Clyde has been gone for days now. Given Sandy’s condition, I am wondering if she has passed on, and if he is alright. Has anyone heard from him?

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        2. I got an email of a couple of days back. He got caught up in the same silliness that a couple of others got caught up in last week with signing in, but he has been overwhelmed with Sandy‘s issues and didn’t really have time to deal with it yet

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        4. I will try again. I followed VS’s instructions. Did not work on phone. As you will see if this works I am still anonymous despite following them.

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        5. Well, I have my name of old. Sandy has four times been right on the verge of entering the final steps of hospice and then the next day she bounces back. Today when I left she was near the final steps. We will see tomorrow
          I am drained, exhausted. When people ask me how I am, I say I need to find someone who can give me the answer. I have no idea what my emotions are.

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  8. I remember my folks having a large
    Cardboard Box of photos they would drag out every now and then and sort through some Random evening.
    They’d Try to identify and sort. I imagine they threw out some.
    A few I remember that still show up in old family photos every now and then.

    We have several totes of photos. Just a few actual albums of photos.
    My sister in law, she has all the photos sorted and in binders, the show off…

    And all those digital photos. How will anyone ever see them in the future? And will they understand why I have so many pictures of crops and dogs??

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  9. I have the old albums, and we’ve been through them once and purged a bit before moving here. And I have the computer files from the past 20 years, maybe.

    I have barely started taking photos with my (relatively new) cell phone. And when I do, I manage to get 5 or 6 when I only want one, so I’m not doing something right. I don’t have to have enough to organize – don’t need one more thing to deal with like that!

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  10. In my paternal grandma’s living room was a round lamp table with a little drawer in it, filled with tiny black-and-white photos. I would look there almost every time we visited. I now think this was the extent of their photographs, and when she died, I think they were sorted, and we got a few of them.

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  11. I had close to 2 dozen photo albums. Over the past few years I have tossed hundreds of photos – people I don’t even remember, boring scenery, not quite in focus or just bad composition. I am now down to 12 albums, which is still too many. For my big international trips I used to put together scrapbooks with pictures, ticket stubs, pamphlets, etc. All but 2 of them have been dismantled, the photos scanned and made into Shutterfly photobooks (they take up much less space).
    Digitally, at one time I had over 18,000 photos on my laptop. In fact, I had to add storage space. It was getting ridiculous so I ruthlessly deleted a ton of them and am now down to about 8,000. Many of the deleted ones were also in the photobooks and there was no need for duplication.
    Speaking of duplication – I still have most of the SD cards and quite a few DVDs with photos from travel and family events. Eventually I will rid myself of them.
    Having to deal with my mom’s hundreds and hundreds of photos after she passed gave me the incentive to cull my own collection. I don’t want my sisters or nieces to have to deal with mine and ask questions like “why did she keep all these” or “who are all these people”.

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      1. The majority of them were from international trips. I would take over 800 photos and my friends would share a ton of theirs as well. Many of them have been deleted from my laptop.

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  12. my mom shorts threw the stuff from our family when I was little and I don’t know if she has any stuff from her family when she was little not much. I don’t believe my dad has nothing. There was a box full of stuff from his family. I gave it to a cousin to do some artwork from and it disappeared. I asked him for it back and he didn’t know where when he gave it to someone so it’s gone my family. My wife has them in files. There are hundreds and hundreds of files and we will keep them in hardcopy forever because the ones that come off the camera are fun to put on the changing easel photograph that we have but I’m not crazy about the media

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  13. I struggled with this: “my mom shorts threw the stuff from our family when I was little and I don’t know if she has any stuff from her family when she was little not much. I don’t believe my dad has nothing.” I don’t think spellchecker would have helped much. Did you dictate this, tim?

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  14. I have a box or two that came to me after my mother died. She had gone through them and grouped them by which branch of the family they were from, and sorted them into envelopes. Some of them have writing on the back identifying the subjects, but not all of them. One that was not labeled at all was of my half sister, who died when I was a kid, and I never met her. I showed the photo to an aunt for help with identification, and she had the answer.

    I’ve scanned some photos, and during the process I messed up my mother’s organization. I need to get back to that box and restore order.

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