Preserving Photo Memories

[Jules]

Since I’ve decided to make myself deal with with all these photos, I found an article that I ripped out the Costco Connection Canada magazine, Nov/Dec 2017. Just did a search and found a digital version on another site.

https://www.lakecountrymuseum.com/preserving-memories/

Here’s part of the article. I’m going back to re-sorting the sorted photos with the plan of tossing many. The last time I glanced at these was 2014 when I did scan some.

First step: organizing

My first step was to take a broad sweep through all the bins. I quickly put the photo albums into one area and all other documents in another. Though it was hard, I adopted this mantra: Toss it if it’s not absolutely precious. So out went Christmas cards from friends, poor-quality snapshots and other things that were important to my folks but not to me or my siblings.

Next, I set up file folders for each member of my family (10 kids in all). As I came across a photo or document that would be of interest to one of them, into his or her folder it went.

Then the hard part began. I sorted through all the photo albums, taking a long trip down memory lane and deciding which photos to digitize and which to discard. This took a dozen long sittings because I had to disassemble many of the books and carefully peel the photos off the pages. For many photos, the decision was easy: Toss those repeated sunset scenes, out-of-focus shots and others that didn’t grip me. But others were more difficult. Who were these people at the dinner table? Would this picture be important to somebody else in my family? And hardest of all: Once I discarded a picture, it would be gone forever.

As to why I didn’t just digitize all the pictures, the answer was time and money. My plan was to use Costco’s Photo Centre to scan all the saved photos. This option saved me countless hours of time, and the scans were high-resolution.

DH said that without adding new scans we already have 40G and that doesn’t count all the photos that I’ve taken on my iphone.

The Toss it if it’s not absolutely precious is the attitude I’m going to take when I start to sort through this house again.