I inherited a ton of old black and white photos, of which I have scanned and sent some to people I recognize. Nobody wanted the physical copies.
I feel bad throwing them all out. But they are taking up space. Any suggestions on what to do with them? Art projects? Donations?
If there’s no intimate stuff there, send the scans to the Internet Archive
search for a creative reuse in your area. some examples are:
texas art asylum in houston and turnip green in nashville
I have inherited the family’s photo archive which goes back before 1900. I keep it safe, and add to it as needed.
It’s a history of my family, so I don’t want it destroyed. Of course, other people may be less sentimental. It’s your choice :-)
Some people don’t have the space. My mother keeps giving me stuff but I live in an apartment without additional storage.
Find an abandoned building with some reputation near by. Use tape and glue to hang all the photos of people on every single wall. Scratch out all the eyes and draw them back on in a sloppy way that makes them look disproportionate and like they’re all staring at the middle of the room. Place a single chair in the middle of the room. Place a teddy bear with a cigar in it’s mouth on the chair. Melt a bunch of candles down to stumps in clusters around the room. It helps to cut a few grooves down the sides. Close the door and seal it with duck tape, like with 6 rolls of tape in every direction. Write “piss off!” On the tape in big painted letters. Have a friend call in a tip to the local news about weird noises in the area.
I’ve inherited a lot of photos, and also a bunch of negatives. I’ve gone and thrown out many vacation photos that weren’t relevant or unique: if I need a photo of the pyramids, I’m fairly confident I can find one, lol. But I kept the one of my mom in front of the pyramids.
I’m in the process of scanning and organizing everything. Once I’m done, I’m planning on putting together five photo albums, all nicely labeled and organized. The first one’s for me, of the people I loved or events I found special. Then one of each of the other albums for my nieces and nephews. There may be a handful of photos I copy and put in each album, but most of the pictures will be unique.
Also enclosed in the albums will be a family tree, and whatever biographical bits of information I can put together of our various relatives. And a DVD with digital copies of all the photos and negatives I scanned in, so everyone will have access to a full set of photos, as well as a subset of the originals. I also have some digitized 8mm home movies from the 1940s and 50s, with my grandparents in the 1970s narrating who the various people are, so I’ll probably include a copy of that.
Honestly, I’m not sure how my nieces and nephews will feel about the albums, but it’s the best connection I can give them to some of their roots and where their people came from. What they do with their albums afterward is up to them; I’ll have honored the people in my past and provided what I can to the people in my future.
This is exactly the boat I’m in!
How did you digitize the 8mm? I managed to get through most of the VHS tapes I had with mixed results. 8mm looked daunting.
Back in the 80s, my uncle paid some company to convert the 8mm to VHS; they overlaid some music over the video, I didn’t remember what. I borrowed the tape sometime around 2002 and converted it to DVD.
Around the same time, my mom had a bunch of reel-to-reel and audio cassette recordings she asked me to convert to CD, which I did. One of the audio tapes was from a family reunion in the mid-70s, where they’d played the same home movies and everyone was discussing them. So I converted the tape and then synced the audio to the video; you can play either one the music or commentary track.
There’s one thing I meant to do back then that I didn’t have the energy to deal with, which was to provide a transcription of the audio, so people would know who’s voice was who’s. Voice-to-text should make that fairly easy now. I think there’s too much over-talking to do a decent set of labeled subtitles, but I might be able to swing something.
Re: your VHS results: if it’s not at the front of the tape when you start working on it, then fast-forward it to the end and then let it rewind; that’ll give you a better tension on the tape. Depending on the tape, it’s quality and it’s condition, how it was stored (temperature/humidity and whether it was on it’s end or on it’s side), and when they thought it had been played last, I might try fast-forwarding and rewinding it anyway, as doing that would reset the tension and make sure that the tape wasn’t sticking to itself when I was playing it and reducing the risk of the tape getting eaten. The trade-off was that doing that could pull some of the magnetized bits off the tape, increasing drop-outs. Whenever I started playing a tape, I was always recording the output, regardless of whether the video had started or the tracking was off, just in case the tape got eaten.
If your tape does get eaten, you can try to iron out some of the wrinkles to get it to play through that section; or just rotate the spindles past the wrinkled bit and resume converting. If a tape gets eaten, I’d clean the heads on your vcr, just in case any debris got in there, and I’d clean it after any particularly dirty tapes (stored poorly, or lots of drop-outs) as well. (If it’s a vcr from a thrift store or something, I’d clean it anyway, and make sure the that the first tapes I played were commercial tapes I didn’t care about in case there were issues with it.)
If the spindles on the tape get jammed, you can unshell the tape and spindles and re-shell them into a new case - I have some old VHS movies I keep on hand for just these situations.
If you’re using a standalone DVD recorder, given the option, use the RCA connections instead of coax for a better picture. If you’re getting unstable brightness or color, try hooking up your cables to the front input instead of the rear inputs; sometimes those recorders pick up DRM-style signals on old tapes and interferes with the recording, except they assumed the front inputs would be used for camcorders and often put less DRM detection on those ports. If you still get unstable brightness or color and think that’s wrong, see if you can find something called a video stabilizer or signal enhancer - that’s what the copyright busters used to be called, and they also helped sharpen the image a bit too.
If you’re having issues with tracking, there are vcrs that let you do manual tracking adjustments, and you might want to see if you can find one. Many of my old Sony vcrs had that ability, and I really liked that. My old Sony vcrs also had the ability to move back and forward frame by frame, which was also nice: I could start the tape, get the tracking nice and settled, then back up to the first frame of the recording and start converting from there, thus avoiding the whole “tracking” notice on the screen without missing any of the recording.
I dunno, I’m kinda babbling, sorry. Are there specific issues you were having with your tapes, or just “this was a cheap tape recorded over multiple times, the recording I want to save was made at EP, it was stored on its side on a hot and humid environment and I’m lucky I managed to get anything off it”?
How old, really?
If they are very old, like 80 or 100 years, then maybe some museum or historician might be interested in keeping them (some of them).
Otherwise, after scanning them, do the unavoidable.
Yeah, probably about that range.
There have been a few good ideas here. A repeat is a local historical society, which I didn’t think of.
scan and archive. Never throw it away unless you really need to do it
Yeah, having the physical medium gives you a more trustworthy backup. Instead of all your hard drives getting wiped by the solar flare, you have multiple different mediums with strengths and weaknesses. I’m also inclined to hold onto physical copies.
You don’t need to feel bad about throwing them out but you may also find takers at a local historical society or municipal archive. Photos are especially attractive to these groups if they have streetscapes, technology, vehicles etc.
See if your local artist school wants them for making collages
Local historical societies and any locations that still exist from those photos maybe ought to be given the option to save them if you don’t want to keep them.
If you can identify people and locations all the better. Since you have scans you can provide a physical thumbnail sheet with what’s going on in each one. Or do what they did in the old days and write on the back of them.
Check with your local midgets library, see if there’s any nearby historical organizations that might want to take a look through. If they don’t know of any, then you’d have to hunt down possibilities on your own, and while that might seem like a worthy effort, most old photos have little or no historical value. You’ve already scanned some. So, if you just don’t want the images lost, scan the rest and chuck the physical
If nobody wanted them, including you, then you have your answer, no? Or maybe you are undecided? It sounds like you can’t decide if you want to keep them or not. Nobody here can make that decision for you.
Personally I don’t think an art project or a donation amounts to much more than avoiding the question of whether you want to keep them or not.
If you have scanned them, then you have a digital copy. I would destroy the physical copies.
Why feel bad? They’re just things. If you have them scanned in then you can reprint them whenever you want.
throw them out.
there is nothing wrong with throwing out stuff. esp if it’s junk to you.
