Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for April 26, 2021

Scan them, burn a CD and never think of them again!

I organize my pictures in two groups. The ones I want to remember and the ones I want to forget.

The never ending saga. Each time I’m determined to cull all the bad ones, then never seem to actually do it!

JJ hits home again. One minor change at our house, instead of just photos it was a half dozen totes of birthday cards, report cards, souvenirs, memorabilia and photos. We emptied a closet, which miraculously still is, and separated a share for each child. It took a year but the last of the piles was finally redistributed just a few weeks ago.

I haven’t worked my way up to that yet. I am trying to declutter so I’ve started with COVID shipping boxes.

I’ve left all my sorting to someone else in my will.

After my mother died last year I’ve spent hours (mostly happy ones and all nostalgic) organising and digitising all the family photos going back to the 1940s — a little before I was born. I’ve only just been able to collect a box — the size of Janis’s — of my father’s slides., which will be a challenge. And after that, I suppose I’ll have to make a start on my own photos. Ah well, it will keep me occupied now I’m retired.

Those pics cost approximately $1 each, including processing and printing. It’s hard to throw that away. Times are different now!

I have 2 shoe boxes of DVDs with photos, We have 3 laptop computers now and none of them have a DVD player in them. I have to buy one to plug in to the lap top.

We’re cleaning out our deceased father’s house finally. Yesterday, my sister took all 30,000 of his slides. Yikes! None of us are young enough to get through them, nor rich enough to have them digitized.

Arlo, ever helpful.

Yeah. Mom would take family photos as a reminder, throw them in a trunk and never look at them again. I don’t know if this had some sort of significance or not.

Scan them and store the images on the cloud. Give friends and family read access and make sure there’s more than one manager of the account. That way access goes on, theoretically, forever. You can keep the ones of your ‘personal’ activities on a CD. Do what you will with the originals.

My best friend scans them and saves to USB drive. CD/DVD drives are becoming scarce, CDs hold 700 MEG data. Average DVD holds 4.7 GIG. A USB thumb drive holds up to 32GIG, some up to 128 GIG, and they take far less space to store, plus the USB drive isn’t going anywhere in the near future. No worries of not being able to access the photos. Now…watch someone will contradict me. lol

Makes me wonder the kids do with the thousands of photos they take on their phones.

A KEA adage — if you don’t know where it is, you don’t have it.

the older you get the less important photos are

Occasionally, projects come along that turn out to be really fun. A family member wanted me to send scanned images of pictures I had found after my father died. This was the first time I had done that with my home scanner. Another time, my fun project was figuring out how to make a DVD out of an old VHS recording of different Departments’ Xmas celebrations at work.

Weren’t they organized before you dumped them on the table? Thus the Again? remark.

Does anybody look at old family photos?

My wife and I decided to make “5 year books”, where we save 5 years of photos to a file, after weeding them out. There are lots of sites where you can arrange them into albums. If you don’t print them, you’ll lose them. Many people saved their photos to floppy disks, CDs, etc, and now can’t see them. Bored during the pandemic? Here’s something to work on!

I have a significant number of photo albums. They will all just be tossed in the trash when I pass

When is she going to organize the polaroid’s that were in the bank vault?

Two pictures of me as a kid still exist; both were taken in 1960. I have no desire to keep them.

Digitize them why don’t you?

There can’t be many as often as they leave the house.