At 56 years of age I am of the vintage of a person who has collected many photos of myself at various stages in my life. I have a collection of my photos from aged 10 handed down by my deceased parents and then college days, youthful twenties, marriage at 30s, children in the 40s etc etc.
I thought all these photos were very important to me. But i hardly ever see them anymore. I cherish the photos of my children but dont look at them as much as before as they have grown and fledged.
My wedding photos are reminders of my youth and parents. Still married now but never bother to see the album lately.
I have reached the stage where seeing the photos, being reminded of youth and deceased relatives is a very emotional experience. I lament the years gone by.
Do you, in your fifties and sixties bother with old photos anymore.
Im 55. I’m not one to look at old photos and my childhood was miserable so I don’t like to be reminded of it. Over the years I’ve thrown away all of my yearbooks and pictures. It felt great to do so. I’m probably an outlier though. My mom and sister have tons of photos though so history hasn’t been erased.
My dad recently turned 90. As a present, we (his three kids) collected all his old slides and had them put onto a CD, which we then put on his computer. There are about 1400 images. He absolutely loved it, and can spend hours sitting at his PC clicking through the years.
I recently did an online search for some old papers of mine. Found a department brochure* with my pic in it. I had forgotten all about it. Great pic. Looks just like FtGKid1 except a few years younger!
That started a nice blooming of some old memories.
You never know what’ll turn up when you go exploring the more remote corners of your brain.
Odd fact 1: This brochure had the same CG image on the cover as a department brochure for another department I had been at. Odd fact 2: Neither department had anything to do with producing that image. It was just cool and “computery”.
I’m the family photo keeper of a big family of sibs. I look often. Usually one of my sibs is asking for copies. My Sisters girls just threw a 50th anniversary for them. They wanted many pictures of their Mom for a display. It was successful as a talking point. It was fun to go through all the pictures looking for just the right photo. Of course my kids photos are precious to me.
Digitize everything. When my mom turned 100 back in 2016, we collected photos from the whole family dating back over 100 years. Got everything scanned, digitized and distributed to every family member. Who knows? Maybe several generations from now one of your descendants will be a Big Deal and everyone will want images of his/her/its antecedents!
My wife and I are both in our 60s and have an assortment of family photos from her family and mine. We have them in albums, and although I can’t remember the last I looked at them, it’s somehow comforting that they exist.
One thing that drives me crazy, though, are the two or three boxes of photos that somehow we acquired from her father, who passed away 30 years ago. There are hundreds of pictures of distant (and now deceased) relatives, going back to the 1930s, with absolutely no identification as to who any of these people were. It seems somehow unthinkable to simply trash them (and I would never suggest doing so to my wife), but we have no idea what to do with them. I’m sure we’re not the only people with this problem.
Just yesterday I came across some old photos from the time I was in the Navy (1968 - 1972) and scanned them into my computer. Damn! I was a lot better looking than I thought I was.
I can’t stand to look at them. Too many of the people are gone. My daughter is grown up and, as she should, is making a life of her own. A couple weeks ago, I found a bunch from the 80s and 90s in my desk and I shredded the lot.
I’m only 30, but I have lost my closest family already so I am a bit too obsessed with old photos I think. Seeing old photos is a bittersweet thing; it’s a hard happiness to see better days past, but it’s better to seee days loved and lost than not to see them at all, to paraphrase Tennyson.
Antique stores and auctioneers get a lot of these. Unless the picture is of someone famous, or a well-known event, they aren’t worth much, if anything. I asked a local appraiser if he’d ever heard of someone looking through pictures and finding one of someone they knew, or experienced it at his own shop, and he said he hadn’t, BUT earlier that same day, someone found a college diploma from an ancestor who had died a generation or two before he was born. There were enough distinctive things about it that he knew it was this person, and purchased it.
Many years ago, my mother was wondering what to do with that box she had of all these pictures she’d received in Christmas cards over the years. This was in the early days of the Internet, for her anyway, so she sorted the photos, looked for the people online, and sent them back if she could. She received a couple of responses from people who were very grateful to have these, because they’d had a fire or flood and lost everything.
My family were never very good at keeping records or taking photos. We’d have a few meaningless snapshots of things that ultimately overlooked what the event really was about, and instead were of people whose names we can’t remember, places that looked better in postcards, or groups sitting at a dinner table. None of the actual events of us enjoying a trip on a boat, or climbing to the top of a lookout point together, or swimming under a waterfall. The fun family times go undocumented, and the boring bland times are all dull and unpleasant to bother looking at.
Meanwhile my Aunt and Uncle and cousins would take hundreds of pictures of everything they did, and yet never improve their skills, with every photo, from the 1960s through to the 2000s, all looking blurry, lopsided, with heads cut off, and thumbs in the corners. So close and yet still not right.
Now I have a camera in my pocket everywhere I go, and take about two pictures per year.
A few years back, I hauled out my box of photos, many from the mid-60s of grade school field trips - all B&W because developing color pics was so expensive! I didn’t recognize anyone in the photos, so I tossed them all.
One of my sisters got most of our childhood albums since my mom didn’t want to deal with them. She’s scanned some and I got a thumb drive with random pics on it. Again, lots of people I don’t remember during events I don’t recall.
Even today, I have a huge collection of digital photos that I almost never look at. Five years ago, my mom and I did a 4-week cruise that is well-documented in photos, most of which I’ve not seen since I created the album. Then there’s my daughter’s high school graduation, college graduation, various trips and family occasions… no one ever looks at them. Kinda makes me wonder why I bother. At least they’ll be easy to save or delete one day.
Along these same lines, I wonder how many people watch the videos of their wedding, or the childbirth videos, or other “occasion” videos. The only videos we watched a couple of times were of our daughter’s dance recitals, and mostly because they were innocently hilarious. But they never got transferred to DVD, so I guess they’re lost forever.
My wife’s parents passed a few years ago. We scanned every single photo we found, almost 3,000, from the early 1920s to around 2000.
We burned DVDs (4GB each) and mailed one to each of 20 first cousins. The family was large but close, and everyone is somewhere in the pics. Reviews are coming in now, and they all seemed very pleased to see this archive.
