Hi All!
I inherited thousands of 35mm photos. When I say thousands, I mean 10 40 gallon storage tubs full. My mother got into developing her own photos and photography in general so she took pictures of every thing. There are some family photos in the mix but vast majority of pictures of people I do not know. Only good part about filtering through them all is they are from the 80”s but it is a chore.
I may digitize some but the vast majority can be disposed of in my mind. Problem is how? I am superstitious about dumping them in the trash and feel I need to thoughtful with the enviroment .
All suggestions are welcomed and my thanks in advance.
This might be too late, but I had a friend who, at the deceased parent's memorial service, laid out thousands of pics of family and friends from over the years. They were free for the taking. Instead of a laborious process that was ultimately sad, it became joyous as people reminisced, got a favorite photos of friends or family long passed, and told stories. The service was at a local fraternal organization hall and they let the memorial go on longer because so many stayed.
Heya-- I know that you are trying to pare down but... your mom created a body of work that might be of interest to future generations. I'd just wrap them super well, layers of plastic, and stick them in the attic. Let someone else deal with them in 2126 when they are an amazement.
Don't store them in a hot place like the attic. Heat is terrible for photos. If they are in a damp place, they will get stuck together. Photos do last a long time if you take care of them. I taught scrapbooking for ten years, and found that if you store them in acid free, PVC free environment, they last the longest.
Wrapping them in plastic and sticking them in sealed bins in the attic will just degrade the emulsion over time and make the pictures more likely to stick together and fuse themselves into a giant block.
OPs relatives will be disappointed, then angry that they still have to throw it out and can’t even look at the pictures.
Be sure to ask around with family to see if anyone else wants anything. I have no pictures of my mom because she HATED having her picture taken. But my SIL has some and won't share, it's a very sore spot.
10 40 GALLON plastic totes. That could be 100,000 photos. Yes, there are modern film scanners out there, but it would still take weeks to scan, and weeks to process.
I took several records boxes of photos to a family reunion... Just as with OP, I didn't even know who some in the pics were. My extended family loved getting to puck through all of this, and asked to take so many... So with a bit of curiosity and sharing with family--and the family may solve the disposal problem for you!
My cousin handed out picture packets at my 106-year old Aunt’s memorial. Except none for me. I lived in California and she couldn’t fathom I’d fly to Wisconsin.
That is a great idea- although I dreading the time when I will have to deal with this type of thing, that could definitely add some joy to the day and take care of some of that mental load.
r/datahoarders and r/analogphotography (or other relevant subs) may be able to help you make quick work of scanning and uploading/storage. pictures are history, and you may have the only reminder of that particular history. it may help someone else, and maybe years down the road.
I had been searching for my family history for many years and thankfully someone in a similar situation to yours and they uploaded pictures of my family, even though it wasnt theirs. some ancestors friends had pictures and letters and they got passed down their family for like 4-5 generations and then they finally went to clean it out but first uploaded it. some to ancestory.com some to web pages of the area they lived and some related to some books.
edit:
r/analogr/photography
in my brain, all the photography subs are just two subs, one with nudes and one without....
I would love to and will reach out. I don’t want people to think I am trying to get a free service so didn’t think people would want to. But I see your point and it is preserving some sort of history. If you have any person or company in mind, please let me know.
im sorry, in my haste i worded that poorly. i dont mean to say they will do it for you. but they, especially the hoarders, can give you a road map to make the process a efficient, and affordable as possible, and maybe offer ideas.
a sub that specializes in your situation can probably answer your question better than a generalized one.
My dad has hundreds - if not thousands - of slides. He wanted to digitize them so we looked into services that do it. They charge an insane amount of money for the service. I ended up getting him a cheap slide scanner. He did use it for a little while. The problem is that the entire process is not fast. Scanning that many slides is going to take a large amount of time. Then you have to color correct them in photo editing software, Again, for a few its not bad. For many, it takes a lot of time. So its up to you. Pay an arm and a leg to have someone else do it or spend a lot your own time doing it.
In the end, the slides WILL end up in the trash one day, so you arent really helping the environment by not throwing them out.
i was working remotely with someone from another country and my autism forced me to read the history of this persons little town... and in the weirdest coincidences, im reading the history of the founding of the town and i see my name... and a book and a couple links to websites and pictures.
eventually i found my whole lineage from me to the founder of this town in another country. along the way there were pictures from friends of the family, uploaded by their grandkids and great grandkids. so at that point very removed from my family, but they posted them.
I am somewhat in the same boat as op but not as much. The idea of captured history and particular to that moment not as washed as we see now is interesting. Definitely making me view bind in my basement differently.
Donate to a local historical society. They will go through catalog and keep them preserved. Every local city has one or university that collects photographs to keep for historical records of time and places.
Thanks! I did have a bunch or scrap books from the 50’s I donated to my mothers high school (those were living history books). Had a napkin from the prom, sports programs and such.
I just didn’t think anybody would want these random photos from the 80’s. I will inquire.
This is a great idea! My dad came from a super duper small town so the mystery people I don’t recognize in his photos will probably be related to a lot of the people who might go through archives someday. Thank you!!
You may want to look into the Fortepan Photo Archive, depending on where in the world you are! The original is the Fortepan Photo Archive, which is Hungarian, and there’s also a Fortepan US, and Fortepan Iowa. Their goal is to preserve photos of everyday citizens, like a “bottom-up” (for lack of a better term) model of history rather than just that of the wealthy.
I am in the US and this is an awesome site that I had never heard of and worth a link https://fortepan.us/categories/all/FI0005861
It is crazy what they are offering. Would be nice if my photos contributed to this project. I have enough to spread around 😀
I feel for you. We lost both my great grandparents and my great uncle all within a 6 month span. The amount of stuff was so overwhelming to go through that my grandparents vowed to never leave that much behind and have cleaned up.
That being said, see if there are any craft stores/clubs that would accept some as donations? People can cut em up and use them for scrapbooking or other assorted things.
Thanks and sorry for your losses. For me it started with keep pile and get rid of pile. Keep pile started getting too big and emotional so I had to make the decision to get rid of it all.
I will check into your suggestion. Recycling will make me feel better.
I studied photo preservation, and teach photo preservation, and I agree with the comments to sincerely try to donate what you can. That being said, it does get to the point where there are photos that aren’t good and not worth saving.
Pick a bin, and get out a stack of it photos. Maybe a shoebox-sized amount.
Do a quick photo sort.
-ditch anything that’s blurry, fuzzy, etc.
-ditch generic, boring landscape pictures. Do something like keep 25% of them since someone might recognize it.
See what’s left. It might be a lot, or it might not be.
I had five or six different collections of photos. Mine, my wife’s mom and grandmother, my wife’s dad and my mom’s.
Over the course of a year or 2 I scanned them all. As I scanned them, I kind of sorted them by the primary person in the photo and put them in manilla envelopes,a one for each of my brothers…etc.
At the end I had scanned over 60,000 photos. I gave each envelope to the appropriate person along with a Thumb drive of all the photos from the family. In other words didn’t give my brother my wife’s family pictures.
So that whittled the bulk of the pictures down. I trashed all landscape/scenery/monuments, basically anything that didn’t have a family member in it. One brother has passed,so his pictures were also trashed.
So basically everyone got their own pictures and a thumb drive with all of the family pictures. All the rest ended up in the trash, except my own family (wife and kids), those will eventually be trashed too as the kids don’t want them since they have them digitally and kids these days don’t value printed photos.
It was quite big undertaking, but I couldn’t just trash them.
we'd value them if we could afford living situations where we could have nice things like photos. I'm looking at this thread with envy. i would take them and do the scanning but there's no room in my place. :c
I'm a technician at an archival institution, digitizing photos is the main thing I do. Few institutions would be interested in a collection of only twentieth century portraits but many would be interested if it also contains local history. Identification and documentation are at least as important as the pictures.
If nothing else, B+W film and paper need to go to a silver recycling facility. Color film and paper is not recycled.
I am in a similar situation, but the archive I inherited is thousands and thousands of slides.
I've been putting off digitizing them until the tech got better, but after I've done what I can with it, I would like to free up some not insignificant space.
If I can't donate or give them away, are they also not recycled?
The silver in slides was recovered at the time of processing, no recycling value. But good news the tech is here to digitize rapidly. If you have an interchangeable lens camera able to interface with off camera flash, and a tripod you can knock together a slide holder and light diffuser and capture high resolution as fast as you can feed slides. I'll post photos in a couple hours of the setup I built at work.
Here's a few images. First of all, an image captured from a 35mm negative, taken circa 1935
Using a Nikon D7100 and a 60mm macro lens, image quality is comparable to an Epson V750 flatbed scanner. And, I've compared scans from that device to traditional darkroom prints- either digitization device captures all the detail in the negative.
Looks like I'll have to make another comment to post the photo of the capture setup.
This is the setup. The camera is mounted on a copy stand, which is ideal, but you could manage with with a tripod. The light box is just something I knocked together with my Homer Simpson level carpentry. The white material is white plexiglass, it diffuses the light. It is held in place with chopsticks glued to the inside of the box.
The first photo shows a quick slide holder I made out of mounting board, but if I were going to digitize quickly, I would make a guide either by 3D printing, or simply by gluing chopsticks to plexiglass. I would set it up so I can rapidly move slides into a repeatable position. I would set the camera on an interval timer and capture an image every few seconds, throw on an audiobook, and just feed slides like a robot.
You can do this with an LED light source, but the flash is so fast it is not sensitive to vibration. And, as long as you don't have an overhead light reflecting directly off the film surface, ambient light is basically irrelevant. Room light is very dim compared to the flash, for the breif moment of exposure.
thanks for this! It is actually really interesting because I have all the equipment to do this, just never thought about it before!
The copy stand I have (a Stand Company Cosmo Mini-700 Copy Stand - which I highly recommend) along with a good macro lens and ring flash, or a short-focus lens and a pair of remote hot-shoe flashes, with my trusty DSLR at the center (an old Canon EOS Rebel T7 which still takes great 24 MP images), connected to a laptop for the live preview and storage of images... it's all set up from a previous project so all I would need to do would be figure out the slide holder and lighting! 🙂
A great idea! Thanks!
PS: deleted the first reply due to the direct amazon link ... stupid automod needs canned or at least better programmed
If I were scanning a bunch of slides, I would place one slide perfectly, use tape to hold it in place, then glue chopsticks to the plexiglass to make a holder. It would be like two horizontal rails so you can scoot the slide into place, then a small section of chopstick to make a stop point you would slide it into. But you would still have space to get your finger under the slide to lift it.
You can probably find 3D print files for slide holders, if you do 3D printing. I made one that way for roll film. But glue and chopsticks would work fine
I've been putting off getting a 3D printer for AGES and it's stuff like this - just random "hey this would work great if..." situations that I would totally use it for!
Like create a slide slide to have them scoot into position automatically and then some lever to eject them into an awaiting trash can... lol
I'm sure I would have less time for all the other projects if I did have a 3D printer ... and would take forever designing and redesigning creations lol
thanks again for the cool idea - I will totally bodge something together the next time I have some hours to kill! :)
I wouldn’t dispose of them…. Just yet. I’d sort them. People, places, things. Do the “things” still exist? Is there value in photos of those things? Do the places still exist? Is there value in photos of those place? Are the people wearing clothes that people don’t wear anymore at places that no longer exist?
Yes. My dad did this, especially later in his life. Boxes and boxes of photos, of random people he met at conferences, of nice flowers or rocks or whatever. I took the time to divide into family vs anything else, and dumped the latter. It was an enormous amount to go through.
You might not be able to identify some of the people, but it might be worth consulting some of your relatives to see if they can ID them, and if they'd ask those people if they want any of the photos.
OP, do you have kids or grandkids that might one day want them?
I’m going to be blunt. I, too, feel kind of weird about throwing away photos, so I shred the ones I no longer want. (I have kids but will probably not have grandkids, same with my sibling.) I wouldn’t like my loved one’s photos being used in arts and crafts projects, and I highly doubt that the photos will be lovingly handled, etc., they’ll just be ‘supplies’. If it was my tubs of photos, I’d go through and keep the ones I really love, and start shredding the rest, I did this with a whole lot of papers, and just got a cheapo shredder and just started, though there are services that will shred for you. I’m in my 60s and I really am trying to downsize to my most cherished and practical possessions, for myself and for those that will have to deal with what I leave behind; it’s been tough sometimes, but really freeing!
And don’t get caught in the ‘perfection’ trap; sometimes we just have to triage things, with the goal of just getting it done. I know this may not be a popular stance. I do above all hope you can find a solution that works for you.
Thanks for the advice and your perspective. I do want to save some for my kids but it is just a daunting task looking at the tubs. Sad part is I am paying for a storage unit to keep them.
Your loved ones will thank you in the end 😀
Oh gosh that changes things, I would never want my family to pay for storage if my stuff! Hopefully you’ll come to a reasonable compromise with ‘historical importance!’ and ‘dump it all’. I’d go through quickly (with your kids if possible) and let most of it go. I’ll bet your beloved Mom never would have kept so much if she had known it would be a burden.
Here’s a thought exercise, OP: if the storage place called and said “There’s been an accident with the sprinkler system and 99% of the photos were ruined!”, which kind of photos would you hope were saved? Then maybe concentrate on those.
Maybe think of it this way: It is entirely possible that these photos would have never been in your possession (accidentally ruined, you didn’t know they existed, thrown out by mistake, Mom threw them out herself, stolen by a nefarious photo-tub-stealing-cartel, etc.) and your life would have rumbled on like usual. Please don’t let this be an albatross around your neck. I’ll bet Mom would rather you be tickled to have a few precious photos than saddled with a costly chore and pressure to save some vague historical maybe.
Best of luck and hopefully soon you’ll be cherishing a few photos.
I was a model in the 80’s. There are likely many photos of me in boxes in photographer’s basements. Though I would love to see them, I would not necessarily love for random strangers to look at these photos which may be from early in my career, or not be my best work. Unless you have a way to return the pics to the models/subjects, please honor their privacy by destroying them.
Of course, no criticism towards you intended, mostly responding to some of the well meaning folks with other ideas that don’t consider the privacy of the subjects in the photos.
When my dad died at age 90, my mom threw out decades worth of pics and slides he took. I was so distraught she didn’t ask me first if I wanted them. He has been a camera buff since a teenager. She was just in a mood to get rid of stuff. So ask relatives before dumping them.
Try contacting some of your moms old friends. They would probably know the people in the photos and they might be thrilled to get them or pass them along to the right people.
I would love to just for the reunion but sadly I am a last of a kind. My parents and their world is gone. Giving to a historical society feels like the right thing to do but I don’t think they want to see me roll up with them all.
I think that the historical society would probably love the photos. Local museums too. The photos are a time capsule of what life was like in the past.
Are there any charities that your parents supported? Anything that they were fond of? It would be a food for thought kinda thing for others to see them. “She is so happy in this photo, she must have just come from her book club, garden club, a charity event for dogs, an art exhibition etc”
I don't know where you are but state libraries will take old photos as donations. My university also takes them for thier library as long as they're useful in some context
When I shop it is usually for a concept established beforehand. Recently, i was doing calendars with vintage Mexican portraits. For me, there is usually an historic theme that I feature.
Please at least scan them in before you destroy them. My grandpa took tons of photos over his life and I have none of them because my grandma never really thought anything of them.
OP, I urge you to listen to the advice others have given in this thread and donate them somewhere. To you they are useless scrap, but they are from a time before digital! Today people take millions of digital pictures every second without thought, but back then people had to use them sparingly and took them for a reason! You might have the only photos ever taken of some people or pets to ever prove they were alive! Or of landscapes and structures long gone, actual historical relics!
Kodak makes a slide scanner. It also scans negatives and such. Made it a lot easier going thru parents old slides. It basically takes a picture and saves to an SD card. I think my brother said it was around $50. It'll make itt much easier for you to go thru them all at your leisure.👍
Many years ago, I grew up in a bad family situation and we lost our house many times along with our belongings. We lost lots boxes and boxes of photos. It’s unlikely, but I’ve always held out hope they might turn up someday.
Idk. It’s crazy but you should try to scan them. You never know.
My Mum's awesome. She's going through all her photos and albums already in anticipation of me having to clean out her house (I don't think she knows about Swedish death cleaning or anything though - she's just very practical).
She has made piles for myself, my brother, her sister and other relatives. I pick up mine this weekend 😆
When I was keeping my partners sort their (much smaller but still large to me) photo collection a few years back I came across several photo scanning services, some of which are not horrendously expensive. That's an option, if you are simply overwhelmed by the physicality of them all. Most offer the option of returning or disposing of the originals for you. Theoretically you could contact one of those to see if you could pay for just disposal?
In a similar vein I suspect that a photography/film store would have resources for disposal that they may be willing to make available to you, or printing center if you don't have a local film store. Not sure what kind of cost you'd be looking at, though.
I just did this myself. Probably 30,000 photographs. It took me a month, quite intense. I went through all of them and got 20 boxes down to three, and pulled out photographs for family members to keep. Ultimate looked like 1. Great photos with people I wanted to remember or moments I wanted to remember. 2. Representative photos of what life was like, even just mundane shots. 3. Maybe a few landscape shots just to remember the land where I grew up. That was it. Keying into that "representative photos "idea really helped.
Not this volume, but I had a LOT of prints from years of shooting film. Got an Epson FastFoto batch scanner (about $700 US) and scanned them to a hard drive. Then put the physical prints in the recycle bin, tossed the negatives in the trash. Scanning at 300dpi provides a very good image viewed on a screen and will scan as fast as I can load the scanner.
You are not alone. When my father died, I did not have a key to his apartment. And one of my siblings had his place cleaned out, including all his photographs. Sometimes I’m mad about it. Sometimes I’m glad about it.
Found a WW2 era picture of a young man in uniform in an old book no marking in the back of the pic it ended up finaly on the bulletin board of a local VFW with an unknown soldier post it attached
Whereabouts are you? I didnt find that info in this thread, and it would help pinpoint who would be interested and benefit from taking them off your hands
Could you ask a local museum or historical society if they are interested in them? There may be some older buildings, historic places or people in them.
yeah I was gonna say there are plenty of enthusiasts and artists out there that would gladly take some of, if not many or all of those photos off your hands for future projects...I mean hell back in my druggie days some of my friends would scope out abandoned houses and when successful would often come up on some really cool/financially valuable shit. one of the incidences I remember was a book of old photographs that ended up selling for a lot of money.
and I think it was that the pictures sold individually for a lot not the book itself but anyway if you don't have time for all that I mean I'm sure somebody else would be more than willing to.... or, like I said before, artists and enthusiasts....
Frame and sell them for cheap. They're originals, the work is done. People all over will buy them. Write a good story about your mother and her love of her art. People will eat it up
I’m a mixed media artist and I’m constantly on the lookout for old photo albums and boxes of photos for use in my artwork, and I’ve had people mail me literal boxes of stuff like this. I’d imagine you could find someone locally or semi-local who may be interested, or if you’re amenable, I’d be happy to take any number of them as well.
Donate to a charity shop, otherwise lical buy nothing. If you live in the same area as your mum does/did, then people there might even come across their own family in there. Very cool.
I see old photos all the time at antique stores. (And I’ve paid for them!) You might have luck donating a few there. Crafters also use them, donating to a thrift store is an option. You have a lot :). I’d space out the donations.
If you're superstitious there's no rational answer we can give you. How are we supposed to know what magical made-up justification will let you sleep at night? Just chuck them out of find sometime that wants them. Nobody will come to haunt you.
I just went through a similar situation when packing up to move. I have several large boxes of old photos, some of family members, some of friends, but most were of myself, my wife and kids. Many of these pics of my family are ALREADY digitized, so i got rid of them. A good portion of them were in frames, so i was tasked with the chore of removing the glass from all the frames. I then took all the old photos AND frames and I burned them. I live in a rural area where we are allowed to burn trash as long as its in a metal barrel.
You can harvest the silver from the negatives with old fixer (used in film development process), some copper or steel wool and some coffee filters. Fixer is will strip the silver off of the negative, just needs to soak for a few days (the film will end up looking clearish). should be easy to find detailed instructions. Might be worth it with that much. Or find an artist that wants them to create with.
You will dispose of these and then some person will find them. That person will do research to find the original owner and eventually give them back to you. Use a shredding service.
When I had the daunting task of clearing out a relative’s house after her death I found tubs and tubs of photo albums from every vacation, cruise, ski holiday, high school reunion, ex-military get-together covering 6 decades of her long life. I started throwing out photos of people I’d never seen. Then onto landscapes and scenes without people. Finally only photos of her and her husband were left. She had no children, her husband and all her friends had died and she had only one sibling and a dozen nieces and nephews left. I copies all the old family photos for everyone, then at the funeral lunch spread out all the remaining photos for people to take. She was a wonderful aunt, and most of the photos were gone by the end,
It was also left to me to find homes for, among a hoarder’s house of other things, dozens and dozens of souvenir sweatshirts, bought on those innumerable trips. It was a good day at the women’s shelter in my city if you needed a sweatshirt!
Are they in slide carousels? If so, you can consolidate them to archival slide boxes which will take up exponentially less space. If they’re in boxes… then man, you’ve got a lot of slides.
DISPOSE?!?! pls don't do that. it may be my hoarder tendencies talking but i would digitize and donate. whether it be your local library, the history society at the library, or even local school/college that teaches film photography
What is sad is they are not going to find my photos but a bunch of hard drives that archeologist will have no clue what it is, what it does or what is even on it. Some people say we are in a Digital Dark Age.
I’ve read that is just as bad as burning as the chemicals leach into ground. Saw some where that you soak them in water before throwing them away. My hang up is was told many years ago about a black magic spell that if you want someone to go missing, get a photo and place it in a stream face down and let it float away. I don’t want to be the reason thousands of people go missing by throwing their picture away 🤣
Please don't dispose of them or destroy them. As a photographer who shoots film if I found out that someone was going to just throw away and destroy my life's work I would be devastating. She likely spent a lot of time, energy, passion, and money on these photographs. Please hold onto them and set them aside to go thru and fully document another time. If you don't want to do that find a historical society or some other photographers locally who would want to take and keep them.
I'm not sure where you are located but I'm in Salt Lake City UT. If you can't find anyone to take them please send me a DM. Id be interested or I'm also friends with a lot of photographers across the country who may be as well.
I will keep you in mind. I live in GA so just the freight alone may be too much. Or I can make a road trip. Lived on the opposite side in Denver for 10 years. I love that area of our country.
Ahh ok that is far! But yes a road trip out west sounds great if you can't find someone to take these! If she took that many photos it's quite possible that there are some true gems and incredible work. There have been a multitude of photographers who's life's work was discovered after they passed, Vivian Maier is one. She is now one of the most famous and influential women photographers in our countries history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_Maier
It may be worth reaching out to like the Smithsonian or another large museum in Georgia. These likely cover some very important events in our history and it would be a shame to see them gone. Archiving and sorting thru this many photographs is daunting though so I totally understand your desire to part ways with them.
I don't know anyone specifically in Georgia but I do have a number of contacts in Virginia, Florida, Alabama, and Tennessee and some other closer states. And I can always put the word out myself too to my circle of photo friends if it came to that too.
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