Who Will Inherit All of These Photos?

So starts the job of deciding what to do with all of our family photos. We inherited an insane amount of photos from family members that have passed away; Bill and I have also taken lots of photos in the last 27 years. Literally we have boxes of 1000’s of photos.  Then there is the straggler photo that is stuck in a book, left in a jewelry box or found in a drawer. There seems to be an endless supply of those pictures as well. 

Who will inherit all of these photos? I plan on distributing them throughout my family. My brother Creighton received most of his photos on his 40th birthday when I made him a scrapbook that started with a wedding picture of our parents up until his 40th birthday. It was a great way to display lots of his personal family photos and memento's of special moments in time.

The first thing I started doing is going through all of the photos and throwing away all of the out of focus, unimportant or that we don’t have a clue of who may be in the photo. I then started sorting them with some going to each of our children, our siblings and a few other family members who we think might appreciate having some of these photos. Luckily most of our own personal photos, I wrote the names and dates on the back. I did this because I remember looking at my own old photos of when I was a child and wondering when they were taken or who were these people. You were left to try and guess about when the photos were taken or who some of these people could be. 

Look how cute we are in these pictures.  I love the black and white photos.

Bill

Debra

I have also started the long and tedious process of scanning all of the photos. Bill and I have lots of photos of our travels and I hope to get all of these scanned and uploaded to Flickr. This is a great site to store your photos online where your family and friends can view them.

You can also scan lots of documents and upload them for storage and easy access. I am going to scan all of our deeds of trust on real estate, marriage licenses, life insurance policies, etc. We will have easy access any where if we need any of these documents.

We do not plan on taking many of the photos with us to Belize because of the humidity there. So it will be great being able to view them on Flickr any time. Thank goodness for digital cameras these days, it is so nice to just be able to upload them directly to Flickr.

I found some tips on storing old photos.

• Store photographs in a dark, cool, dry place where the temperature and humidity stay constant.
• Never store photos in the attic or garage.
• Never eat or drink around photos.
• Get organized by throwing out photos that are out of focus or who are unidentified, etc.
• Store fragile letters and news clippings in acid-free paper.

What do you plan on doing with all of your old photos? Who will inherit all of your photos?