My sister and I are getting older and our kids are in their 20's and 30's. None of them seem very interested in our family heritage so our problem is who should keep the original photos. I basically have all of them simply because I was more interested in them after our grandparents passed away than my sister was. She has since become just as consumed with old photos as I am. I have one daughter and she has 5 kids.
So, I'm wondering how you may have divided the original old paper photos among your family or is there just one keeper of the photos in your family.
I, too, would love to hear some answers to Lori's GREAT question. I inherited all the family heritage photos from two great aunts who did not have children, plus now boxes and boxes of photos from my grandmother and mother. I am trying to figure out the same thing - keep them together, split them up, create digital files to share.....so many possibilities. Lori, I am struggling with this exact same thing!
A couple of years ago we took 6mths to travel in our coaster bus to see some of the Australian outback, our son and his family stayed at our home, one of my daughters took our photographs for safe keeping..... she scanned them and handed them out to the other kids... some of them took original photos.... I don't see a problem with the kids splitting the photos up as long as they share the digitals as well...
My Grandmother is 92 and over the past few years she has been dividing her photos up between all of the grandkids. My aunt, her daughter, is very much a memory keeper so she has taken the most and has stored them properly. I love looking at all of the old war photos my Grandpa took, he was a B-17 pilot and has some amazing pics taken from his plane. It can be overwhelming to see how many my gma has. Tons and tons. First, she sorted through them and if she couldn't remember who the person in the pic is or if there is no info written on the back she pretty much gets rid of it.
so, for my family... I am the eldest of 7 children. I have kept all of the originals. For the longest time I was the only one interested in genealogy, etc. When my younger siblings (who all have children now) became interested... I simply scanned every photo at 300ppi and created a CD for each family so they could each print their own copies. No one in my family was upset about this but I know families are different. It was a good solution for our family. And... I must admit that there weren't probably as many photos as most have... especially since there were floods and house fires in our past (not too many left in the first place). And a lot of those were personal copies that my grams had passed on to me before she died after I graduated high school.
I also would note that I also saved a print quality of any layouts I had completed genealogy wise and of the particular family (sister/brother, niece/nephew) on their CDs, too.
Don't know if that helps at all but it's what we did.
I've started scanning all our old photos. It's time consuming but well worth the effort.
as others have said ... scan the photos in ... start with the more important ones first ... number or name them and when you have a few minutes record any writing on the back of the photos and say who they are ... I've also included a light circle around the person if it's a class photo etc. You can put them on a EHD for safety, write them to a CD although they are going out with the bath water. Thumb drives are inexpensive now and had scads of MB so you could share them that way and for those people who mean something special you could have photo books printed as a Christmas present or even some framed prints for those who are interested. I think preserving our ancestors is very important ... we are a family who keeps searching our family history. There are photos there that have no names and no-one has mentioned them and that is sad. I've got one photo there of a young woman that looks exactly like me and I would have loved to know who she was and her story ... Gibson girl era so relatives are all long gone. It is a lot of work but well worth it.
I place as many photos as I can on the scanner at one time and scan at 600 ppi .. it takes a couple of minutes longer but well worth it for some of the smaller photos because I can enlarge them.
There are businesses that will do this for you if you don't feel you have the time, then all you would have to do is the cataloguing etc.
Thanks to everyone who commented! It really helped to hear what others are saying. I ended up scanning ALL the old family photos and the ones I had that my sister and her kids are in. Then I put them all on a thumb drive for her to keep. I may eventually ask her if there are any original paper photos she'd like to keep but it's so hard giving them up even though they will still be in the family.
I think scanning the photos for each person to have a digital copy of them is the way to go. In my family I think they were divided between families and then the grands with the most interest received the photos. In DH's family, they're divided between him and a cousin since they have the most interest in family history.
I totally agree with Lisa. I bought a Fijitsu refurbished ScanSnap printer & I absolutely LOVE it, it scans super fast, great resoluation, & you can scan both sides of the photo if there is writing on the back. I actually bought this for me & my photos & I've been trying to get my parents to send me some of their old photos, but still waiting on that. In the long run it was actually cheaper to buy scanner than it would have been to take them somewhere & get them commercially scanned. Scanning & providing a digital copy for everyone is the way to go. Actually you could put them in a dropbox folder & then you have them in the cloud, so they are there for all time. Best of luck, so sweet of you to share those memories.