It’s OK to throw those photos away. You’re welcome.
Some scanners can be set to separate photos. You put ten or so on the glass and it provides you with ten jpgs (or whatever). It’s still a chore, but ten times less of one.
I have to agree with that. By the time I got to the fifth box, looking for duplicates to toss, I started tossing scenery. (If you’ve only got one bin, I envy you. I think there were somewhere between seven and twelve. I’m down to one and have blocked the original total out.) Another thing I tossed were postcards that were bought as mementoes and kept with the photos - never sent, just bought for the images.
The ones that made me feel guilty were the shots of Great Grandma B standing by her car. GGB, at one point, went on vacations with Great Uncle L, her son. For every trip, he took a picture of her standing by her car during the trek. Dozens of them in exactly the same pose.
She looked very pleased with the vacation, but there was never the slightest bit of information about where they were taken. I kept five to represent the lot and swallowed my guilt about the rest.
If you love your children, label your photos. Toddlers in my family all look alike.
I would have no use for old blank postcards but I see them all the time vintage stores. 
I’ve bought a few vintage postcards highlighting my town on eBay, so I knew that old postcards could be sold. But at that point, it wasn’t worth my time. I checked with my sisters, and neither of them wanted to keep them or take the time to sell them.
Did I ever mention that while dealing with my mother’s things we ran her little town out of trash bags? Also the next two towns over.
Photos were a small part of that. It was mostly old paperwork. We also killed her paper shredder and had to buy a new one.
The NY Times has an article (paywalled, I presume) on the “junk” passed down from Boomers’ parents to Boomers to Boomers’ Kids, and notes the emotional issues attached to stuff and getting rid of it. My brother and I just went through several photo albums from my parents, keeping some, passing some on to interested relatives (“Uncle Wally took baby pics of me? That’s great! My parents didn’t get a camera until I was 10!”) and through out most. We laughed, we cried, and we freed up 2 big totes while preserving some photos that struck deep chords. Someone else will through out those when we die. It is not easy.
Start with the ones you don’t use. Not in the ‘I’m never changing my own oil again, I don’t need this filter wrench anymore’ sense, but something more like “I have 30 screwdrivers and I haven’t used this one since I chipped it a few years ago”.
Even better, you know that one set of pliers or cheap screwdriver that, every time you grab it, the first thing that that pops into your head is ‘gross, why is the handle sticky’. Toss it, you still have plenty more that aren’t covered in slowly dissolving rubber. Same goes for those crappy tools that came in a crappy set you got when you bought your first house/rented your first apartment. They’re junk, toss them.
Put me in with those who think – if the money is manageable for you – you should outsource the pics to a professional scanning service.
Years ago, I took a few file boxes full of paperwork to one of these places. I got back a couple of DVDs for a very reasonable price.
As far as I could tell, every single sheet scanned properly, and in order. They even bothered to pull of a half dozen different Post-It notes that somebody else had put on a few pages.
Then, there’s still the ongoing question of what to do with the digital version, but …
I’m glad I saw this thread, as the timing is extremely fortuitous to me. After Dad died in 2016, Mom moved from apartment to assisted living to nursing care, and the result was a boatload of stuff in a storage unit. Mom died last December, and because of covid, we delayed her memorial service until next month. That’s also when we are going through all of her stuff.
I’m doing the first and second passes and have thrown or donated a lot, but there’s still much more to go. Dad was an excellent photographer, and there about 40 photo albums…and over 1000 slides. We also want to digitize and toss, so the scanner linked by @FinsToTheLeft looks like it might be a worthwhile investment. Or maybe my nearly-new HP LaserJet can scan multiple photos and render multiple jpegs.
By far the hardest thing will be my grandparents and great-grandparents stuff. Somehow both Mom and Dad became the archivists and keepers of heirlooms for each family, so now we have it. None of our cousins want it, but they don’t want anything thrown away, either. But I don’t want my kids to have to deal with it.
Good advice I worked my entire life as a mechanic and my hobby has always been construction and woodworking. A lot of times I won’t have my toolbox with me I’ll be at a lady’s house and she needs something fixed so I’ll go to harbor freight and buy some cheap tool to fix it with those are the ones that I really built up a surplus of
You never can tell. My wife has loads of old photos, including a number of an “uncle” (actually, her step-mother’s BIL) who grew up in Prague and barely escaped in 1939. So we had some old photos from Prague. Fast forward to about 2010 and my son is acting in a show that takes place in Prague in the 1930s, playing the part of a rabbi. (Amusingly, he performs a wedding and the groom is played by his son.) Then my son got interested and made a great scrapbook of Prague in the 30s and this distant relative. And we sent him scans of all those photos that he put in his scrapbook.
Me? Personally? I like throwing shit out, but I can’t throw out old photos and family history. My parents are still alive, and I still go through their photos every so often, to get a sense of time and place and people of yesteryear. That’s me, though. Photos don’t take up a lot of room compared to other stuff I throw away. I, personally, would not throw them out, but everyone’s different.
That’s a huge red flag. Anyone who wants something saved needs to take it themselves. They have no right to demand you store their stuff.
Tell them flat out: “It’s going in the trash on Tuesday. You’re welcome to come get it first.” If they don’t live local, you’ll take it to your local UPS store and they can then pay to have it shipped to them.
If they won’t put up, they get to shut up.
All of this is hard enough without extended family conveniently piling their guilt and emotional cowardice onto your back.
There are scanning services that will digitize everything for you - and that may be your best bet.
No clue which ones are good / reliable / affordable. And I expect you’d need to pull the photos out of the albums manually, to send them off.
But really, I’d find some way to keep the photos - either as is, or electronically. If you toss them, you can’t go back if you later find you want to look at them.
Of course, I’m not the best advocate for this. We still have boxes of photos from 20 years ago, before we went digital, and there are loads of duplicates. We need to strip them down (toss the duplicates, or multiple shots of the same thing, etc.) and then get them scanned.
Damn right!
This is timely. So there’s this big box of pictures that I have all in the envelopes from the developer. These were from the years that I was with my now ex-wife so around 1989 to 2005. She made photo albums so these are the pics that didn’t make it into the albums or double prints for stuff that did.
So the ex and I got dinner last week (we are still good friends) and the subject of the box of pictures came up. We both agreed that it’s fine to toss them and they are literally in the trash can right now on the curb ready to go in the truck later today.
Yep, and that’s going to be the message at the upcoming family reunion. I plan to take about two totes full of stuff, and whatever is left over is going straight to the dumpster.
That’s certainly true.
I would check with the rest of the family first, though, to make sure nobody does want to take them.
Double agree. When I got divorced eight years ago, we had a big box o’ photos, and damn near 95% were scenery with nobody in it. Out of hundreds of photos I kept maybe a dozen with people in them and maybe 5 of scenery, because I could dozens of better pictures of the same scenery online, so why bother?
It goes triple if it’s unlabeled scenery and has already been passed down twice before it got to you.
I hae archived thousands of old photos and slides of my family. Some advice:
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Good scanning software should allow you to load your scanner plate with all the photos that fit on it, and detect the edges of the photos and save each one separately. You don’t have to scan one photo at a time.
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Ditch the photo albums after you have scanned the photos, and store them instead in labelled envelopes. Photos don’t take up much space - the albums do.
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Likewise, slide reels take up huge space, but slides do not. I found some slide-sized plastic storage boxes at the dollar store and converted a six-foot stack of slide reels into a couple of flat plastic boxes the size of a breadbox in total.
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Slide reels have value, but not much. You can sell then for $2-$5 each. I have about 20 of them that I’m just going to recycle.
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When thinking about what photos to keep, pay attention to the background. There are historical societies for cities and towns looking for old street-scapes, pictures of old buildings that no longer exist, etc. If there are old friends in the picture, they might like to have a copy.
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Most old photos are faded somewhat. There are lots of programs that will do color correction and simple restoration in batch mode.
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When looking for the best photos to keep, don’t hesitate to crop them. Sometimes a close crop of an otherwise unmemorable picture can reveal things you never saw before. One photographer in my family seemed to get about 80% sky in every outdoor photo, with the subjects in the bottom third of the image and very tiny. They all looked like crap throwaway photos, but once cropped and sharpened had some amazing stuff that no one had ever seen including the photographer.
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Use the process as a learning experience. You are studying the past. If you really pay attention you might learn a lot about the people of the time and how they lived.
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Look to see if there are genealogical societies that might want some pictures. My family is Mennonite, and there are lots of groups looking for Mennonite historical images.
Not just historical buildings, but pictures of the family house (and farm buildings) are interesting and informative, especially color photos that show original paint schemes. I might not recognize some of the people from a few generations ago, but I know the house that my parents raised me in.