I have a LOT of stuff. Boxes and boxes of electronic parts and tools and hardware. But, I am making an effort to get rid of things that are redundant or obsolete (anyone want a functional Tek 468 'scope?).
When my folks died, my sister and I divided up most of the personal items. I ended up with loads of photographs and picture albums. Many of the these images are ones they took on vacations, and my Dad wasn’t a great photographer, so they aren’t worth keeping for their artistic value. But, I’m having problems tossing them. It’s so final. There are also hundreds of images of the family, but I’m not sure I even want to keep those. Maybe I should just take iPhone snaps of them, just to remember them by. I don’t think it’s worth doing high-quality scans.
I even have photos of Dad’s college graduation, which is neat, but I can’t imagine hanging it on a wall.
Maybe I should just throw the box away unreviewed, but that would be going very much against type for me.
I also could just put them on a shelf, and make it someone else’s problem someday…
You might want to check out the De-clutter thread.
I started making a concerted effort to get rid of stuff. Give it away, sell some, donate a lot of it. I took very little from my parents home. Though we still ended up with a bunch in my basement for my daughter in anticipation of her first apartment.
I’m always looking to get rid of more.
I tend to be a pack-rat so my perspective here may not be especially useful, but I would regard family photos as irreplaceable mementos that you might someday appreciate having and enjoy going through, even if just briefly and infrequently. Personally, I would keep them – the volume surely couldn’t amount to more than a single one of what is commonly known as a bankers box at most.
Of course you could scan them and just keep them electronically, but that would probably be a lot more trouble than the saving in storage space was worth.
This is what I’m doing. I’ve scanned about 4 large boxes of pictures with my
scanner that will feed about 25 or so in a stack. Facial recognition software then helps to organize them.
My plan was to scan and toss, but my niece wants the originals so they are now her problem.
Wow, I tend to be behind the times technologically sometimes. A scanner that can process high volumes quickly is certainly one potential solution!
My policy is to digitize and toss. I dislike the sense of throwing away something of value, even if it’s unlikely that I’ll ever receive that value. Digital stuff takes no space, has negligible cost, and doesn’t require destroying something permanently.
I’d probably have them scanned professionally; it costs around ~$0.25 per pic for a few hundred. Scanners are fine but then you have a scanner you might not have any further use for.
I do the same thing for other physical mementos. I have T-shirts that I want to remember, except I’ve no interest in holding onto an old shirt. Take a picture and dump it.
I am in a similar situation to beowulff as my Dad was an avid photographer, but not a particularly good one. His photography would probably fall into a “data capture” style, in that there was neither interest nor attempts at composition.
At any rate, both my parents are gone and I’m now saddled with a Rubbermaid “Roughneck” bin full of slide trays.
I have three sisters who are about 15 years older than me, one of whom is an entitled drama queen, and the other two couldn’t give a rat’s ass about family. So maybe a quarter to a third would have any meaning to me and the rest would be recognizable to my sisters. So I have to be ruthless about this.
If I don’t inform my sisters they won’t care, unless somehow they find out, otherwise this could just drag on forever.
I don’t have an answer to if you should toss them or not, however, if you keep them, put some info on them. On each picture, write on the back whatever info you happen to know*, names of people, where the picture is, date, event etc.
Kids, nieces/nephews, grandkids, cousins, etc will run across them at some point and it’s a lot easier for them to sit around looking at them if they know who the people are. Plus, it saves them the time of trying to track down older relatives to see if they know anything about them.
From time to time one of my sisters will drag out a box of old pictures 50+ years old and we’ll all look at them and try to figure out who’s who. And every time we do that I keep trying to tell them to write it on the picture so we know going forward. We’re running out of 80+ year old family members, that were actually there, to ask about them.
*I’d suggest you stick just to what you know for sure, if you’re guessing, at least put a question mark next to whatever you write.
Or if you have access to a flatbed scanner, you could do as many as you can fit on it at a time. Not quite as convenient to look at, but at least you’ll still have them and if anyone ever ones one, they can crop it out and print it.
OP might even want to put a request out on facebook to see if someone wants to do it for him. It’s very possible there’s a high school kid with a scanner that would be willing to scan them all for a hundred bucks or so.
Which coast is that oscilloscope nearest?
The west.
I’m in Arizona.
I’d toss anything without a person in it, and curate all the remaining photos separating out anything you really want to scan and keep.
Hey, if that’s too far for @vbob , I’ll happily pay shipping to Texas! Heck, I’d probably pay a good portion of what folks are asking on Ebay.
As far as the photographs go. As a former fine arts photography student: Dang, I hate to tell someone to throw those away. They’re too great for making collages out of. But fact is, if they don’t mean much to you as an external trigger for memories, it should be fine to get rid of them. I’ve done that with a lot of my mother’s vacation photos, myself.
Yes, somehow I am the family archivist. Got the permiso the take all the old photos out of their frames, so now I only have 1 huge HD tote instead of 3. Nobody wants them, until they do. So I’m stuck.
Luckily for me, that’s too far. As a Rhode Islander, EVERYTHING is ‘too fa’ - even the next town over…
Another thought might be to trade the oscilloscope and/or sundry electrobits to a local maker-space for scanning services or privileges.
I too have totes of old family photos that no one wants until they do. Except for the one brass-clasped leather-bound album with labeled photos of immigrant great-great-grandparents that ended up in the collection of late widowed step-grand-aunt whose executrix tossed it in the dumpster with everything else not sold at unannounced estate clearance on the opposite coast.
I get that. It’s like there’s a door in your mind that won’t quite close.
I would love to oblige and tell you that it’s okay to throw the photos away, but maybe you aren’t ready to do that yet. My advice is not to force it.
Lucky for me, one of my sisters wants all the old family photos, so I don’t have to deal with that. I used to have a box of pictures I took, going back to grade school class trips in black and white because I couldn’t afford color film and processing (circa 1965-66) One day, I pulled the box out, realized I didn’t know where many of them were taken or who the heck those people were, so I tossed most of them. There’s a box in the basement with some albums - I need to pull them out, scan those worth saving, and toss the rest - my daughter certainly won’t care about the people I went thru bootcamp with. Heck, I don’t care any longer.
I’ve gotten ruthless in my old age - throw it all away!!! 
You gott be ruthless. My parents left behind dozens of carefully crafted photo albums of b&w old photos of family most dead, post retirement camping trips cruises etc.
We pressed the old b&w albums on a sister to take who was driving home as the rest of us were flying and no room in luggage. The other ones ended up in the garbage. It was not a good feeling but what else could we do, No one really wanted to keep them as a memento, it seems wasteful and my mom would have been so pissed off she kept those albums until her death.
I recently came across a stack of wallet sized kid photos of mine own and nieces nephews and friends kids. School pictures. I could have kept it in a neat stack and found a cubbyhole to stash em never to be looked at again. I tossed ‘em. In a flash of irritation at myself, I’m decluttering and it gets personal so I hardened my heart to do it.
I kept my parents HS yearbooks, sibs wanted to trash em, I’m like what! No way. So class of 49 N Catholic HS Germantown PA is on my shelf.
I’m trying to break the power these words have over me. I figure, if I do someday regret throwing something out, well…I’ve done other things I regret much more, so I’ll get over tossing the old pictures. Heck, there’s a good chance I’ll never think of them again at all!
Every photograph I own could easily fit in my wallet. Nothing has sentimental value to me and I have no idea why. I have friends who rent storage spaces or have expensive storage units built to store junk. Trophies, medals awards etc have always gone straight in the trash, never saved them. Something about thinking of the past too much makes me uncomfortable. My weakness is tools, I have too many tools and can’t bring myself to thinning them out. I happily give them away if I feel they will be used.
It can be hard to declutter. I got rid of so much and still probably have far too much stuff.