Curmudgeon Loc: SE Arizona

As an amateur picture taker who drifted in and out of the hobby several times, and having to meet no quality standard other than my own, I now have about 1000 slides and about the same number of negatives I took in my younger years. Some of them are really poor quality and I wonder why I didn't just throw them out at the time. Now I'm glad I didn't. Post processing software incorporating AI and other technology is enabling us to salvage some, even most, of those old photos and of course some of the less than marginal digital images.

My suggestion to the younger members of the UHH community is save everything. Storage is cheap. Get a 4 TB external hard drive save all your culls by year. When you fill it up get another. A lot of the culls you save will be snap shot quality, slightly out of focus or something but when you get to my age and are sitting around with your cronies, kids/grandkids you will remember something that happened in 2019 that you vaguely remember taking a picture of. You will not believe how many times I have gone through most of those slides to find one from 1960 and if you think you have that 2019 picture you will too. At least you won't have to look at individual slides and negs.

Fred Harwood Loc: Sheffield, Mass.

Agree.

Ched49 Loc: Pittsburgh, Pa.

I absolutely get what your talking about. I wish my parents and relatives would have written on the back of the old black & white photo's they took when they were young, who they were with and what year it was taken.

TB4 Loc: TX

I’m getting ready to move. As someone else on the hog remarked, my kids will just throw my old photos away when I die so why hang on to them. I’ve thrown away thousands of slides and negatives. They are predominately landscapes and nature shots and I have no expectation of becoming famous or them having any value to anyone. Therefore, I keep thinking my best photos are ahead of me and the old ones are trash. If I haven’t looked at them in the past several years I seriously doubt I will in the future.

Architect1776 Loc: In my mind

I agree with all the silly BIF, Eiffel Tower, flowers and other generic photos that there are thousands of. The photographer might enjoy them and that is great. But don't think for a minute anyone else will give a hoot once you are gone.
I do save all family photos even boring ones as I have collected over a century of such photos and digitized many (Still working on it). Of personal photos I do save some of places I have been especially those that are off the beaten path that are literally unique and remind me of assignments etc. and of restricted locations.
Many when I go will be trash as well to others and I don't care. But so far it seems that family photos are quite popular even those over 100 years old as long as they are identified.

BlueMorel Loc: Southwest Michigan

My oldest photo I have is either a cabinet card of my gr-gr-gr-grandfather in his Union Army uniform, somewhat faded but still recognizable, or the tintype that we believe was taken about 1870-1880 of another g-g-grandfather and grandmother and two of their children. These old photos have made me realize that it is not important that you are old and wrinkled, that your clothes weren't fancy, that you had a scowl on your face, that you are one of five overweight great-aunts in a line - they give a link to your past, particularly important to those who live far away. The out-of-focus, faded prints that I made myself over the years are ones I cherish because I remember taking them. However, the umpteenth picture of waves crashing on shore, every mountain we passed on a trip west, every red rock in Utah and Arizona, I don't really need to keep except for representatives of the trip. I really don't think the kids will want them either - they are busy making their own memories, but they enjoy the ones with people in them. It makes me sad when I go to an estate sale and there are large numbers of photos of people long-forgotten who at one time wanted to be remembered.

Architect1776 Loc: In my mind

AlGreg

I retired in 1998 and bought my first digital camera, a Nikon coolpix 950, in 2000. My wife and I traveled all over the USA in a motorhome and I took a lot of pictures of this great country. About 5 years ago I copied a lot of my favorites into a folder for a slide show and cropped them all to a 16x9 aspect ratio. My desktop background is a constant show of the great pictures I have of our life for the last 19 years. I have upgraded my cameras over the years. The coolpix 950 is a 2 MP camera and the cropped pictures shown on a 25" monitor look great. I went to a Nikon E5700 next and then a D60. I had a couple of Cannon shirt pocket cameras for our ventures into Mexican border towns and festivals and such where taking pictures was a secondary part of the day, but now are a reminder of the great life of being retired. I am now 71 and living the winter months in South Texas and the summer months in the Adirondack mountains of NY. Last month I gave myself a Nikon D7200 for my 71st birthday. I hardly ever print a picture, so I am looking forward to putting some keepers from my new camera into my desktop slide show and possibly printing some larger prints in canvas to hang on my walls.

newtoyou Loc: Eastport

Your photo of the millepede was judged politically incorrect by Nikonian, but remains. A reason I save some terribly bad photos is to see what went wrong. Usually me. I am actually too lazy sometimes to go to the trouble to erase. They don't weigh much. I do not take people photos. Unless asked. At family affairs in an extended family the size of ours, there are many cameras and phone cameras. I leave mine in the car.
What happens to years of photos when I die?
I will never know.
I shoot for my pleasure.
Bill

Vincejr Loc: Northern Kentucky

Yes I to have the same wish the people who have taken the picture didn't write who or where or what the picture was of.

gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

I scanned all of my slides and prints and used Element's ability to assign a date-taken to each in its data base, plus other tags of course.

Vincejr Loc: Northern Kentucky

It would be nice to know what you are looking at on the pictures with out info when where who we just don't have any idea.

G. Crook Loc: Linden, TX

I have been in the process (slowly) of digitizing my old photos as well as my parents. A wild mix of color, BW prints and various sizes of slides. In my folks photos, very few are identified. They were campers and travelled with many different friends.

Digitizing everything would be a time consuming nightmare. As I go through their photos I simply trash anything unrecognizable, be it landscape or people. If (and a big of) I can identify places or people I MAY keep and digitize them. I have a daughter and granddaughter who are both interested in family history so I keep relevant photos. As for my old photos and slides I am trying to separate them by general locations. 25 years in the Air Force and many moves/different countries it is hard to catalog either by year or location. Still working on that.

Bottom line. With my folks photos (well over 3,000 slides alone) I have, so far, trashed over half, right from the git go. Many photo albums yet to go through. I have to be harsh in my decisions. If there is any question as to what to do with a given picture, they go in the trash.

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

I agree. I've never thrown out any photographs. In some cases, they make great examples of what not to do and what it looks like when you do it.
--Bob

cr0ak Loc: Texas

It's funny that you mention the estate sales. My cousin recently passed away and I inherited the contents of her house. I can find very, very few of her as a baby, but scads of other "family" pictures - none of them dated or with names on the backs. My dilemma is whether or not I should just throw them out, or include them in the estate sale. I really don't like tossing old photos of "family" members, but who's going to care about them when I'm gone? Certainly not my daughter/grandkids. So why should I hang onto them if I can't identify the people in the photos? It's truly a shame, but I can't keep everything!

As someone else said, no one's going to want the photos I've taken. I have about 11 boxes of slides that I shot when I took a 9-day raft trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon back in the early '70s. I haven't looked at them in eons. Is my daughter going to want them? Very doubtful! Yet, to just throw them out seems to be a travesty. It's like throwing away your memories. I guess I'll just hang onto them (and all my other photos). When I'm dead, my daughter can pitch them if she doesn't want them. At least I won't be around to see her do it! LOL