My sister-in-law continued to use a film camera when her kids (now twentysomething) were little, on the theory that if she was just taking digital pictures, they’d mostly be lost, but she had to go to some effort for film.
I recently used the Google Photoscan app to scan some old pictures with my phone. It’s like taking a picture of a picture. It worked pretty well for me.
I fell in love with photography when I was a kid with a Brownie Hawkeye. In high school I took a photography class, learning how to compose, shoot, develop and print (B&W). I used my mother’s old Argus C-3 for that and then my parents bought me a Petri 7, which, while still a parallax camera, had a built-in light meter. When I got to Vietnam, I bought a Minolta SR-101 and shot with that for many years. Although I was always really good at composition, I was pretty indiscriminate about subject matter early on.
In the early 90s, I bought a Canon that I turned out not to like, then went to a Nikon N70 and shot up a lot of film, especially wildlife. I bought my first digital camera, a rather clunky Olympus, then my first digital SLR, a Nikon D100 which could use my lenses. I shot with that for a number of years and probably should have just quit, but hey, new and shinier things come along, amirite? So I now have a Nikon 7200 that I rarely use, and an array of lenses. And in the basement are boxes and albums of print photos, and on my computer are probably thousands of digital photos that I rarely look at.
At some point it occurs to you that when you die nobody will give a shit about any of it, and yet you just can’t bring yourself to throw it away/erase it all. So my sympathies to the OP.
The funny thing is that if there was some sort of “random old photos curator/distributor” you could hire I have a shitload of photos of a variety of locations as they were 40 years ago.
Back in the 90s when I was still married to my (now ex-) Japanese wife, we went on a vacation with her family. Her sister’s father-in-law was s as professional photographer specializing in the area around Mt. Fuji.
“Keiko” had just gotten a new camera with some really cool lens. I had had a couple of classes in photography and 15 years of experience so she suggested I try it and when she developed the prints we could look at them.
She took a couple of pictures of a particular scene first, then I did. Finally the FIL took some. We all used the same camera all with a few minutes of each other so the light was the same. We all took pictures of the same scenery from the same place.
It was debatable if Keiko’s or my pictures were better, but there was absolutely no doubt as to which ones were taken by a professional.
Looking back, it was really liberating. While my teachers had complimented me previously, I knew that it was just something I could enjoy for myself.
My brother, who passed away last year, was a serious amateur photographer. I inherited quite a few large cartons of his slides. I started going through them, but it didn’t take me long to realize that he saved absolutely everything, and never separated out the best photos. On top of that, nothing is ID’d.
I’m just gonna toss all the slides and sell his equipment. I have more than enough of my own crap.
My mother had tons of slides which, sadly, she apparently just threw away at some point before she died. She was not a sentimental person and probably just saw them as excess baggage, not realizing that some of them could be converted into prints. A lot of photos of my siblings and I and other family members went to the landfill.
That is too bad. Though I have a lot to go through, at least I have the options.