I commend you for doing this! I am currently working on the sorting myself. It IS a chore! Both my Mother (85) and my elderly Aunt gave me tubs of photos, with in a week of each other, no less.

Fortunately, I've been able to identify most of the people in the photos even though they were taken way before my time.

Getting them in some kind of order and the into a scrapbook is the next project. I expect that will take, oh, forever? LOL

Would like to see some of your presentations.

Impressive!

It definitely is a time consuming process. I removed all my photos from those inexpensive albums that I had bought years ago - the ones with the adhesive backs with plastic sheets. Then I labeled the backs with a soft lead pencil with names, dates, event and places. I'm using shoebox sized boxes for storage and creating separate collections for my 3 kids. When finished I may scan them.

Are you using archival materials that are acid-free?

https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/properly-store-old-photographs-148003

Unless this is something a person wants to do without regard to whether anyone else would be interested in having the work product, it might make sense to check in with those potential recipients to see if the work is worth doing.

In my own case a younger family member cleaned out the family home after the second of my two parents died. I was given a couple of boxes of photos and albums that I frankly didn't want. I spent maybe an hour flipping through what was there. I asked my kids, none were interested in having any photos of their grandparents' lives or indeed childhood photos of me and my siblings. Or even seeing them.

I discarded the boxes of photos with no regret then or now. No one wanted them.

Interesting about the 12x12 pages ... we've got one album done for our DD, we used the photo-pocket style because it's what we had. Will investigate the larger size format, so thanks for the tip!

It's kind of sad that no-one wanted photos of Grandparents or parents. Now they are gone forever and a future generation might have treasured them.

Elizabeth, I'm not sure but perhaps you're superimposing your sentiments about family photos on others who don't share you view?

Besides me and my own immediate family, my mother's photo collection included those of her parents, siblings and her own childhood. I remember the large drawer where she kept the collection because I'd sometimes happen upon it when looking for something else. She never looked at the pictures and I honestly don't know why she kept them.

As I said before, none of us wanted any of them. I don't keep things just to keep them.

I was speaking to my own feelings and it's good you and your family are on the same page.

Thank you. That's why for us it's not sad in any way and why I responded to your comment.

I'm so impressed with your organizational skills! I have have just about none; however, I have literally thousands of photographs. My dad was an avid photographer who left me countless albums and --best of all-- negatives and slides. And a love of photography myself. Some years ago I bought a good scanner that handles all sizes of negatives, and a rather massive but excellent photo printer, and I set about digitizing his legacy and printing quite a bit of it. His own prints (made in the bathroom of my childhood, which he turned into a darkroom every so often) have held up extremely well. But I know the prints I make today will last much longer.

I love prints, especially large ones. With only a few exceptions, the smallest size I print is 5x7". I don't use my own printer for everything because the ink is so expensive and the process can be time consuming. When I've accumulated a big enough order I have the prints done professionally by Mpix or Printique, both online. It usually depends on which one is having a sale.

Most of the prints are kept in Itoya Profolio albums. Not pretty or fancy, but sleek and protective. I have them in all sizes up to 11x14". I have some 16x20 prints as well, but they're in frames. My dad had excellent cameras, and enlargements made from his negatives are wonderful.

Then, of course, I have my own photos--the ones that documented my kids' childhoods and the later ones that I used to exhibit. I always use cameras, but many of my friends use their phones to take pictures. Some of the quality is great, but the photos sit in the phone or are uploaded to their computers and forgotten. Maybe no one cares now, but it's possible years or decades from now family members or their descendants would love to know what grandma looked like, or where their parents grew up, or something else. I guarantee they'd much rather look through an album of good, clear photos than scroll through countless snapshots of varying quality on whatever electronic device is available at that point.

Elmer, your mother may have kept those pictures of her family because she loved her family and the pictures were evidence that they lived.

I just want to add that my dad photographed a lot of people. When I was growing up he took portraits and candid shots of our many friends, some of whom were family members of the kids I was friends with. Today, those friends are so grateful to him for having taken pictures of their families. Back in those days, some people had Kodak Brownies, but most people we knew didn't have cameras at all. I've stayed close with the friends from my childhood, and they're well aware that without my dad and his cameras they wouldn't have these photos to share with their children and grandchildren.

I culled many photos from the pile and kept only the best. Some of the ones that I kept include photos that, although you know who the people are, you can't see much detail about them. These, and some others, I included partly to compose a concept of what life was like for the family and to give some feeling for the times they lived in.

My grandparents were born in the late 1890s. For my generation, born post WWII, we are probably the first generation that can document our genealogy and heritage through photos. It was only around that time that photography became available to more people and became more common.

One of the oldest I have was taken circa 1900 and it is a photo of the old family cabin in east Texas. All of the family has come out into the front yard of the house and taken up a pose. Unlike our modern inclination to gather in to a group and have a group shot, they are all scattered about the large yard. Some are standing under the tree. Great great grandmother is standing by herself (she is a civil war bride) and some men are sitting in a small row boat. My own grandmother is but a young girl leaning against a tree.

Of course they had no camera in those days. This was taken by a traveling photographer. I have seen other photos that are staged in much the sane manner and it leads me to think that reflects what they thought a photo should be about. It was a different perspective for them than it is for our modern world.

Having the photos culled, sorted, arranged, notated, and sequenced and put into an accessible format brings it all to life. It becomes more than just having them all contained. It gives motion to those captured images and it gives voice to them, as well.

Having a box of random photos of your old aunt, your cousins first grade school pic,a picture of the neighbor that used to live down the street and some of you eating ice cream when you were two years old is not a very engaging way to interact with the images and moments of life that have been captured and saved.

Although, a box is a valid way to keep photos, it is not suitable for many of the varied sizes and vintages. It also is much easier and more enjoyable to be able to open up a book of images of your heritage. For the older ones, being in a book also helps to preserve them.

One other thing that I have realized about the photos is that each generation, or era, of home photography had common elements that defined and exemplified what they thought at that time that a photo should capture, how it should be staged and what was deemed important enough to be captured in image.

The reasons for taking a photo were much different from what they are today. Today we will take a digital image of our lunch, the cat sleeping, or the rash on our toes. It does not matter too much because it is almost unlimited in how many we can take. They are cheap and throwaway.

That was not so before digital. You had to buy a camera, film of a limited number of exposures on each roll, and you had to pay to get each one developed. Every photo was kept, regardless of how it turned out. It was an investment, of sorts.

It is interesting to see how our ideas about photographing our families, our lives and our world have changed over the course of the first full century where it became possible for so many to do so.

This collection of images has become something more than just simple putting them all in a box or a book to keep them. I feel that I have been able to extract and bring into focus and to compose a story of who are the people who's DNA courses through our bodies and our lives. Families flow and change.

It strikes me that how our concept of who is our family changes.

Sometimes when I am with my kids and grandkids I look around and see these people that are so familiar to me as my family members. However, the family that I was surrounded with a few decades ago would not recognize and never knew many that I call family now. And., so it goes.

A word about how best to keep the photos.

I decided on 12x12 pages because it allows many different sizes of photos to be arranged on the page and it allows for some creative composition. There is also the choice of using smaller pages, 8x11. A smaller page is easier and cheaper to find a binder to hold them. Larger binders for the 12x12 are a bit harder to come by.

After trying to use little photo corners for the photos I realized that it was going to be quite expensive to do that for all of them.

For larger portraits or vulnerable old ones, I did use the photo corners.

For the majority of the photos I found that a small one inch strip of photo tape on the back that keeps them tacked to the page works pretty well. Since each page goes into a protective sleeve, it seems to work fine.

Of course, I use acid free materials.

When it comes to the 4x6 photos that are the last of the ones before digital took over, those might lend themselves well to being kept in an album with pockets. Since they are bright and uniform they might be just fine like that. It reflects the changing sense of things to come along with the digital times. By that time, we had become much more liberal with what we used film for and it became much quicker to get your photos. It began to change and the nature of the photos reflects that.

I had some modern photos that were in a cheap pocket album that I had bought at Target some time ago. I could see that the photos that were in there seemed to be being affected by something, They looked to be darkening. Whether it was just my imagination or real, I took them out immediately and won't be putting anything of any value back into that book. It is a cheap little album and I don't think it is good for the photos. Beware of cheap ones!

It has been an interesting journey through the old images. When I started out it was simply to put some order to the mess. What I uncovered was a story that has become intriguing and set me to thinking and pondering all manner of reflections.

Sure that many of you have stories to be revealed, just as I do.

I have five descendants and I am passing this story down to them because it is their story, too. I am not going to "check with them" first. This is not an unwanted china cabinet full of unused and unwanted china or a collection of grandmas ceramic gnomes. This is something much different that I have found that was hiding in boxes scattered in closets and on shelves and buried in the debris of lesser images. This is us.