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Thread: Photographs

  1. #1
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    Photographs

    Well, I started with 12 of those shoebox size archival boxes full... threw the equivalent of 2 boxes full in the garbage... set aside half a box full for my mom and brother (they just lost everything in the wildfires and asked for photos), and some for another friend, pulled out all the pictures of my classrooms over the years and added some of them to my "portfolio" then trashed the rest, pulled out all the photos of quilts and put them in sleeves and put them with my quilting patterns...

    And I have 8 BOXES full left!! I guess the next step s scrapbooking 3 or 4 events of my grandsons for my daughter, then I want to make a scrapbook of all of my dogs... That will probably leave 7 boxes.

    I'm just not really sure what I want to do with these. Putting them in archival sleeves in albums would be expensive, but if I'm not going to really preserve them, why keep them at all? Also, many of these I have not looked at in several years. And, I want the "important" ones to be really portable, i.e. probably Not in heavy albums.

    [As I mentioned, my brother & SIL, and my mother, both lost their entire homes to wildfire 2 weeks ago. Then a grass fire started 20 miles from where I live yesterday evening!! As I looked around and mentally ran through the 5 P's for evacuation- People, Pets, Prescriptions, Papers, Photos- I realized I'm in really good shape with everything but the photos.]

    I guess the answer really is to scan the Important Ones to a thumb drive. (I scanned all my important papers to thumb drive 1.5 year ago) But what about the rest? Keep? Dump? Feedback? Ideas?

  2. #2
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    I started with about 9 shoe-size photo boxes. I scanned them onto SD memory cards! I then gave some of the physical pictures to people I though would like to have them, shredded a bunch of them and am keeping a minimal few. I still have some albums to go through and scan as well. I so thrilled with this project as I still have ALL the pictures digitally, but not the clutter of the actual photos - which nobody has looked at in over a decade anyway. If I ever want a physical copy, I can simply have it printed.
    To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer." Mahatma Gandhi
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  3. #3
    Senior Member Teacher Terry's Avatar
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    That sounds like a lot of work for both of you. I am only worrying about the first 3 P’s if I ever have to evacuate because of fires. My kids told me to keep the photo albums and some day they will take what they want. I will probably be dead but that’s fine. I have about 7 albums.

  4. #4
    Senior Member SteveinMN's Avatar
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    As the one in the family who has the most room in his house, I had tons of pictures that I'd taken and that family had taken earlier. Not quite so many prints but lots of digital images. Time has helped determine which ones to keep. Most people take lots of pictures which are pretty much duplicates of others, so picking the one where Johnny has his eyes closed or a car drove past just as you snapped the shutter on that mountain are easy to get rid of.

    In addition, I find most events can be represented well by just a few key pictures. Frankly, I groan whenever I see that someone has uploaded 63 pictures of their kid's birthday party to Facebook or a photo site. Unless the kid is Princess Charlotte, 63 is overkill. Save a few. I took many pictures at our granddaughter's first birthday but I saved only the ones in which she is blowing out the candles, smashing the cake, and playing with the box that contained her main gift. Her parents have a few more pictures; one of her sitting next to a chalkboard proclaiming "I'm One Year Old!", and some videos. More than that? Most people are not going to want to sit through so many pictures. Having to scan prints (or paying someone to do that for you) will help you cull out the non-essential images, too.

    Once you've distilled the pictures down to the select few, then a thumb drive is a good idea. They are small and inexpensive. They are not foolproof, however, so it would be smart to copy the same images to two thumb drives and store one away from your house. Pick a very portable format like JPEG with as high a quality as you can get. I have some images from my first digital SLR in their original RAW format; the manufacturer's software to allow editing those files disappeared a couple of computer OS versions ago. I have some software that can do a more basic job but it is limited so all the space those files take up now are kind of a waste. So pick a non-proprietary format and don't fill the thumb drive up to the brim; leave some free space for file work.

    And check your thumb drives periodically for what is called "bit rot" -- make sure the drive is readable in whatever has to read it and you can get to the files for viewing and (ideally) editing.
    Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington

  5. #5
    Senior Member catherine's Avatar
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    I feel putting pictures on a thumb drive is a fail-safe but should not be the main thing. How many people have floppy drives these days? Or VHS tapes? Once the technology is obsolete, the pictures are gone. Fine for us--we can remember to transfer pictures from a thumb drive to Cloud for instance, but what about future generations who may come across some weird tech device vaguely labeled "pictures" and want to or even be able to see them? Most of you would say "who cares"? Maybe I have to ask myself that question.

    Because I value the historical aspect of photographs, I would never destroy all my pictures and keep only scans. I would seriously cull them, put them in an album of some type, labelled with everyone's name, and THEN scan them. That's pretty much what I have now, but I am behind. Given my appreciation for the hard copy of photos, I'm WAY behind on selecting the best digital photos and printing them out. I have an old computer with a dead battery that I used from 2008-2012, and there are a lot of great pictures on it. I keep thinking that I have to copy them over to a thumb drive before the hard drive goes kaput, and print out a few of the best ones.

    Not minimalist, I know, but I don't have faith in the ability to retrieve things in the future if they are saved on current technology. I would like to have at least my grandchildren be able to appreciate them. I love the pictures I have of my great grandfather.
    "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" Emily Webb, Our Town
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  6. #6
    Senior Member SteveinMN's Avatar
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    catherine, you're right. Which is why saving/archiving pictures has to follow the same rules as backing up the rest of the computer's data (yeah, I know how often people do that). Backup requires accommodating changes in media/OS ability to support the file format/organizational scheme of what has been saved. If my post implied, "Oh, that thumb drive will be a fine storage medium for years," I didn't write well enough.

    Cloud storage could be an option, though I have used a couple of cloud services that have gone under, requiring a fairly rapid move of gigabytes of data on my part -- and which would call for modifying whatever instructions (URL, ID, password) I'd left for those future generations to access those images.

    Similarly, many printing methods won't result in images that survive the duration, either. Consumer-grade ink is better than it was even ten years ago, but it's still important to consider the archival quality of pictures printed at home and even at popular (i.e., price-driven) photo-printing services.

    Yeah, it was easier to take the film roll to the developer, get the pictures back, and stuff 'em in a shoebox, hardly ever again to see the light of day...
    Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington

  7. #7
    Moderator Float On's Avatar
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    I weeded through probably 12 photo boxes of photos. Early in I assumed you always got two copies because that's what my mom did. So I started gluing all the dupes onto cardstock and used them as note cards to send to people. They got a kick out of old photos (people, places, nature) and I could care less if they kept or tossed. I still have 4 boxes under my bed...getting dusty. It's been a goal to do something with them the last 3 years but I'll probably move that to next year's list as well. I did move all photos from my last laptop to SD cards and they sit in the safe deposit box at the bank. We save too much. Remember how careful we were to get the best shots out of our roll of 12, 24, or 36 film?

    I recently had to unfollow a friend on facebook because she is dealing with the grief of loosing her mother by focusing her photography on hummingbirds. I love hummingbirds but I don't want to weed through 200+ photos a day she is posting of her hummingbirds.
    Float On: My "Happy Place" is on my little kayak in the coves of Table Rock Lake.

  8. #8
    Senior Member Teacher Terry's Avatar
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    My mom had us pick out the pictures we wanted and then she threw her albums away when she was dying. My cousin has all her mom’s pictures and I can tell they are a burden by the way she talks about needing to go through them but it’s such a big job. Meanwhile they sit in her basement. I have a nice picture of my grandparents displayed but my kids never knew them so once I am gone no one will want it.

  9. #9
    Senior Member KayLR's Avatar
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    This is a job I have procrastinated on for years. I need to commit to doing it this winter. I even bought a photo scanner for this purpose. I think I dread it because it conjures up memories I'd rather forget. It's unpleasant.
    My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far today, I have finished two bags of M&Ms and a chocolate cake. I feel better already!

  10. #10
    Senior Member iris lilies's Avatar
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    It has been about ten years now that I took my mother’s stash of photos in boxes and dealt with them. She was, like everyone else, always planning to organize them into albums.that didnt happen.

    What the collection REALLY needed was purging. She wasnt willing to do that while she still had charge of her brain, so I waited until after her dementia took over and took the collection home. i weeded it. i laid out the photos of ancient relatives, had those duplicated because there were very few, had them all copied onto a dvd, and then I mailed these dvds and selected originals to the younger generation (actually, mailed each batch to their parents, figuring the parents would keep them.)

    That left me with tons of unremarkable images from my own family of origin. I purged more photos, sorted out the good ones, split the collection of good ones in half, and stuffed these two collections into cheap albums. Mailed one to my brother and only sibling.

    I have now about 7 albums of photos. They will die with me, and that is ok. I swe the photo album of my friend, shot dead,by her husband, go into a dumpster in the alley. He sister got rid of it there. That bugged me, so I pulled her album into my house and kept it for several years. After a while I was able to let it go, back into a dumpster.

    I will say that there isnt anything bad, IMHO, about keeping these family photos we all have in boxes. They do need some sort of organizing principle, usually chronological. Most importantly, they need to be labeled on the back, in pencil, with names of people, approximate dates, and occasions. The context of the photo is so very important in giving it meaning for future generations if it is important to ya’ll to hand them down.

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