This is probably ridiculous, but I am wondering what others have done with the bad family photos. Not the “so bad they’re good” ones.
The ones that will never make it into a photo album. The whole sheet of wallet sized class pics that you never gave to the family 12 years ago, or the one where your kid really does look pretty terrible, or the half closed eyes of three of four people in the photo, or the boring blurry photos, or the pic of yet another meal while sitting at the table and you have no memory of why that photo was ever taken, etc…
I somehow feel it’s especially wrong to throw out any pics of my kids, or even a vacation photo that’s a bit out of focus and uninteresting. So I have stacks of pretty terrible photos. I also have a lot of good albums with great photos.
Is this just me? What have you all done with all the bad pics?
When my kids were little (and I printed out lots more pics cause it was all the pic on the camera roll!) I used to take the “bad photos” and put them in a basket for the kids. As babies/toddlers we would use them like a book labeling the people/objects in the photos. As young kids they would use them for crafty things or just to look through! Sometimes my kids would cut them up and make refrigerator magnets out of them - those were actually quite funny!
You could do this same type of thing with grandchildren if you have them. Punch a hole in photos and put them on a ring for a toddler photo book.
But at my house NOW, the bad photos go right here: garbage can!
We tossed them…a long time ago. Went through all the boxes of pictures. Threw away all negatives, and threw away all pictures that were marginal, or otherwise poor quality.
Kept a couple of clear show boxes of pictures we thought were OK
I just feel like I cannot throw a photo of my kids in the trash, no matter how bad it is. Like I’m trashing my children. Do I just need to get over it?
You can digitize them if you don’t have them in a digital format already. Then you’re not really throwing it away. It’s in the archives, but not taking up physical space.
When you take photos on your phone do you keep them all or delete the bad ones after you take them? I delete a fair amount right away. I’m not as ruthless as my kids, but I don’t take as many photos as they do either. But think of it like that.
If you choose to keep them, write on the back of them and say who is in the photo and where and when it was taken. Makes it a lot easier for other folks going through them later.
I recently helped a friend purge and pack for a house sale and move. She had TWELVE huge Rubbermaid bins of photos in her attic. We went through each item. Tossed anything that was marginal. Tossed EVERYTHING where she couldn’t name the people in the pictures or where the pics showed peoples backs. Tossed ALL duplicates, triplicates and negatives. Tossed all the multiples of every year school
pictures. Tossed everything where she and I felt the subject of the picture wouldn’t ever want to see that horrible pic again.
Kept…a few old family sepia photos of unknown relatives (she thought). Kept ONE wallet size school pic from each year (and put it into the album she had for those. Kept ONE of each of the Olin Mills pics per year…not per month…per year.
We pared it down to four shoe box size clear bins….which we sorted into family, friends, child, misc. She was planning to digitize the ones we kept.
But then we had the twelve bins to deal with. Those got donated!
If you happen to know. We have a pile of family unlabeled pictures. We have asked members of the family who these folks are…and everyone gives us a different set of name🤦🏻♀️
I spent time culling through old pictures last year. I threw away many, many pictures & all negatives. H asked why I threw away the negatives, and I asked him if he could ever envision needing them … given that he hadn’t touched them in 30+ years. He didn’t have a response, and I tossed them.?? I separated pictures into various stacks … pictures with my family, his family, kids, kids with friends, kids together, various holidays, pictures from college, pictures from trips. The next step is to go through slides from the days when H preferred to process slides instead of prints (darn him!), then to digitize. It’s so much work!
Wish I could say I am doing better with pictures of GD, but I’m not. I started out putting the best pictures into a separate album on my phone. That fell by the wayside after a couple months, and now a year has passed. Argh.
I just went through thousands and thousands of my parents photos. If anything was post 1970, I tossed the bad ones. Pre '70s, I kept and sorted. I’m working on getting all the old photos scanned.
That’s why it’s important to do it now while your generation knows who they are. I have a lot of old family photos and the older ones are pretty good about being labeled, but there are some kinda old, but not really old ones that aren’t always labeled and you are left looking at it like, who is this? Where is this? When was this?
Same advice goes for any family heirlooms. Write up what you know about it on a piece of paper and put it with the object/jewelry/piece of furniture/etc. It’s so much more meaningful if you know that old rocking chair was great great grandmas that she brought along the Oregon Trail or whatever, rather than just an old chair.
