Deciding What To Do With Old Photos

As we, as humans, like to preserve our memories as much as possible, we tend to keep hold of a lot of things that remind us of our past. One such memorabilia is photos, both printed and original. But as much as we like to hold on to these memories, they take up a lot of space in our homes over the years. So it’s high time you started deciding what to do with old photos. 

You’ll be spoilt for choices when thinking about how to deal with all the old photos in your home. You can digitize them and save a lot of space, create a photo book, make a collage, a photo wall, etc with these old photos, slides, and negatives. You also have to take the necessary preparations before doing anything with them.

Let’s take a look at how to deal with your old photos at home.

Preparing to deal with old photos at home

As years pass, the photos that we, our parents and grandparents took, start piling up at our homes. These photos have a lot of sentimental value to us and are a great way to remember our long-lost ones.

But just keeping them stacked in shoeboxes won’t do us any good, rather it will damage the photos, sometimes irreparably. So what to do with these photos? There are a lot of ways older photos can be dealt with. But before you do anything, you have to take some much-needed preparations. These are:

1. Decide what you want to do

Before doing anything with the photos, you must first decide what you should do with them. If you want to digitize them, choose the photos accordingly. If you want to keep them as the hard copy, act keeping that in mind.

2. Start discarding unnecessary photos

Once you start going through your photos, you will be surprised at how many unnecessary photos you have in your collection. Some of them weren’t taken the right way, some of them are repetitive and some of them have people in them that you don’t recognize or you don’t want to be a part of your life anymore. Throw those photos out to lessen your workload. 

3. Don’t try to do everything at once

Since you probably have hundreds of photos in your home, sorting them out will be a pain in the rear. So take your time while doing so. Take breaks in the middle of the work and try to do the culling in two or three sittings.

4. Prepare the photos for whatever you want to do with them

Once you’ve thrown every unnecessary photo out, and since you’ve already decided what to do with the remaining photos, prepare them accordingly. If you want to digitize them, prepare them for scanning or for sending them to a digitizing service. If you want to do something else with them, ensure they are prepared for that.

How to deal with your old photos

Once everything is sorted out, you now can start to deal with the photos as you see fit.

There are plenty of options you can choose from when utilizing old photos. Let’s take a look:

1. Digitizing them

The best way to deal with heaps of old photos is to digitize them. You can digitize your prints, slides, and even negatives. The upside of digitizing photos is that it will instantly free up a lot of space in your home while also protecting the photos from damage. Yes, it will cost you some money, but everything you do with your photos will. 

2. Creating a photo book

Another popular way of dealing with old photos is to make a photo book with all the photos of the present and past. Organize them in such a way that they tell a story. You can organize them by date, putting the earliest photos first. 

3. Make a collage

Another thing you can do with old photos is to create a collage. The advantage of collages is that you can make multiple of them adhering to a theme. For example, you can make three different collages, one containing school photos, one containing photos of various family trips and functions, and the third one containing photos of lost loved ones. 

4. Make a photo wall

One of the most creative things you can do with your old photos is to make a photo wall with them. Take a bunch of photos and stick them to a wall to decorate it. You can use glue or pins to do it. It will both deal with the photos and also make excellent home decor.

5. Make a family tree

If you have photos of enough people, you can make a family tree. This is both something unique and also will remind the next generation about the family and their forebears. Making a family tree with photos is especially advantageous because most of us don’t know what our great-grandparents looked like and the family tree will help people in this regard.

6. Create art projects using negatives and photos

If you digitize your negatives, you don’t need them anymore. You can either use these negatives or the ones you have discarded to create eye-catching art projects to decorate your walls and other parts of your house. Artworks with negatives are extremely unique and beautiful, which will only add to the aesthetics of the house. 

Your negatives aren’t the only things that can be turned into art. You can also use your photos to do it. You can cut photos accordingly and use items such as ribbons, twigs, etc to make unique artwork with the hard copies of the photos. 

7. Put them in jewelry

A very popular thing to do with old photos is to put them in various pieces of jewelry such as lockets, etc. All you need to do is put the cut-up version of the photo inside a locket and give it to a loved one. The sheer happiness in their eyes will be worth all the hassle. 

8. Donate the photos to a museum

You will be surprised to know how much old photos are worth to various museums, even if they don’t have any apparent historical value. Find a museum that is willing to take old photos and donate these to them. They have the means to correctly preserve old photos and your memories will live for a long time while also being admired by others. 

Final Words

Deciding what to do with old photos can be a tough and exhausting job. But if you take the right preparations and follow the correct way, then you can easily make sure your photos are dealt with in a convenient, easy, and fast way. 

FAQ

1. Is it OK to throw away old pictures?

If you think that once you digitize your old photos, you don’t need your old photos anymore, then you can throw them away. But sometimes it can come in clutch if you keep the photos for a little bit longer. If you digitize them and find the results unsatisfactory, then you will need these photos again for sending them to another service. 

2. How do I decide which photos to keep?

When sorting out old photos, deciding which photos to keep becomes a major cause of headaches. If some photos are repetitive, blurry, or unnecessary, you don’t need to keep these photos. Keep the most unique, and memorable photos and the ones which have a lot of family members in them.