Scan those family photos!
I’ve been saying that to myself for years.
Our family photos — thousands (tens of thousands?) of them — have been lurking at the bottom of my to-do list for decades.
Dutifully, I’ve been copying a reminder — “scan family photos” — from the bottom of one list to the bottom of the next. And from their place at the bottom of the list, those words have been giving me the evil eye. I could die any minute, they reproach. It could happen fast, no warning. I could wind up leaving my kids with boxes and boxes of photos to —
To do what?
My Millennial Heirs
I live in a house. I have a closet big enough to store 38 boxes packed solid with slides, photos and negatives.
My kids, on the other hand, are millennials. They have just enough space in their dwellings to house themselves, their spouses, their laptops, and a miscellaneous kid or two — with not an inch to spare for nine cubic feet of family archives.
And so, all those photos need to get small. Very small. They need to be digitized.
Over they years, naturally, other projects have elbowed out the “scan family photos” project. The wall between the kitchen and the dining room cried out to be taken down. The retaining wall in the backyard had to be kept from sliding downhill; it was going to take the Monterey pine with it.
And then Jon died. And with that, a whole new set of gotta-dos crowded onto my list. Meet with the lawyer about the will, Meet with the cemetery guy about the burial site. Talk to God (refuse to talk to God?) about what God had done with Jon.
But then, this past Friday, to my surprise, “scan family photos” found its way to the top of my to-do list.
Not the very top. On Fridays, the No. 1 spot goes to “write blog post.”
Friday is my designated writing day. The blog posts you read on this website get written on a Friday, though bits of them sometimes get written in the wee hours of a Saturday.
And so, on this most recent of my Friday mornings, it looked like “scan family photos” was headed to the bottom of the to-do list once again.
Except it wasn’t.
To heck with the blog post, I said to myself over breakfast oatmeal. What I really, really want to do today is get face-to-face with those boxes of family photos upstairs in Christina’s closet. All 38 of them.
Organize the photos. Locate someone to scan them for me.
And that’s what I did on Friday.
It’s a Big, Big Project
It will take some time — days — to organize those photos. But it will feel super good to have this project behind me.
I’ll be able to die in peace.
Seriously. Dying with thousands of family photos in disarray in a bedroom closet for the kids to come across when they go to sell the house (move into the house?) — it’s not what I’d call a peaceful death.
Peaceful for me, maybe. But not for my kids. And I like my kids. My kids are cute. They were even cuter when they were little, of course. And I’ve got ten thousand photos to prove it.
I feel your pain! Coming from a certain age group, this is a real issue. My kid may want 10 of the hundreds of pictures I have. Still, I can’t get myself to part with them, so I’m letting her do it after I’m gone. It’s her right of passage. My mom has been sending her pictures for years in birthday, anniversary, and any other card she can think of. She’s 101, and down to a tidy pile that I can handle. At least mine are organized by year!😜
Mine have been organized by year as well. Each year has one or two boxes. I don’t want to part with my photos, but I think I’ll look at them more if they’re digitized. You can put the whole mess on an iPad, and look at them that way. Still, there are a lot of duds in my collection. I’ll give those the heave-ho… Your mom is 101!?! Wow!
Wow! 38 boxes! Now I understand your email asking if I knew of a scanning service.
I have one box of family photos. My sister who worked on the family tree for years, until she let someone put it all together for her, took some boxes of photos many years ago, plus she has four kids, many grandchildren and some great grandchildren for whom she has skads of photos I’m sure. Most of my photos are still in the envelopes from the photo shops.
I know what you’re saying about to-do lists and moving things on them. My 1957 T-Bird was on my list for years until I finally gave the car away last month and I was able to remove it. What a relief!
A T-Bird! A very big item. More than 9 cubic feet, probably. Congrats!
We have the same problem. I’m a pack rat, much to the annoyance of both daughters & dear husband. I need to prioritize this project, with no excuse allowed for postponing. but would rather read several books …
Can you put the books on your to-do list and merrily cross them of when you’re done?
I’ve done it in several stages, and you are right! It is tons of work. I used Scan Cafe, and then lately I’ve been doing some myself with iPhone apps. I’m dreaming of the end. It feels good to toss the pix with no one I recognize in them, the bare landscapes, the monuments that are easily found online, the out-of-focus ones, the poorly lit ones, and so on. It has taken me years, BTW. Deciding to start is the least of it. Good luck!
I was planning to have the negatives scanned, rather than the prints, which would make gleaning ahead of time close to impossible. Negatives are supposed to make better copies. But I like the idea of tossing out the irrelevant ones . . . so, let me think about this.
same situation here, but sadly no photos of us and a kid and cub
Any old cat photos? I’m thinking of the one that would visit your front yard.
yes, and now i have the company of a feral cat who often sits on my lap, and is photogenic, of course,
but only on phone!