Digitizing Old Photos

I'm a photographer by trade (or at least I was before baby came along) so photos are almost literally my bread and butter. I love taking them, not just "photographs" but snapshots just to commemorate the occasion. For me no occasion is complete without at least a few dozen snaps. I'd say photos are one of my favorite things in life. They are practically the only decorations hanging on my walls and sitting on the horizontal surfaces. They were also, until recently, taking up tons of space in my house. Photo albums, boxes of photos, a huge steamer trunk full of nothing but photos. The floor of my closet was over run with photo storage. My photos, my husbands photos, our combined photos, photos from other people...you get the picture (get it? Picture?...nevermind) ANYWAY. As much as I love my photographs, the old ones don't get looked at that often. All the time and energy I spent putting them lovingly in albums seems wasted now as they have become just one more thing to dust, and one more thing that is taking up precious space in my house.

So about a month ago I finally pulled the plug. I pulled out every. single. photo. I resisted the digital switch for a long time so I had thousands of prints that were good ol' film.  I printed off post-its with dates ranging from 1980 to the present, cleared off the dining room table and began sorting. This took a long time. As I was sorting through my entire life and reminiscing I came across a few things I had forgotten and lots of cherished memories. I also found that I had doubles and sometimes triples of a lot of things. Those got thrown out. (Incidentally you can not recycle photo paper. It kind of hurt my hippie sensibilities to throw out that much paper, but, means and ends and all of that) There were also A LOT of what we will call "not keepers" from back in the film days. Out of focus, or left me saying "What the heck is that?" Also went to the trash. I tossed almost all of the prints that had been taken with a digital camera because they were mostly one or two photos out of sequence that didn't go in the scrapbook or with anything else. There we a few sticky points (how many pictures of the mountains do you need no matter how beautiful they are?) but in the end I ended up getting rid of well over 2,500 prints.
The rest I bundled into years and took them to F32 Photo to have them digitized. There are on-line services that do this as well but I chose F32 because it's local. I didn't really want to send all of my precious photos to Bangalore, thanks. Yes, it was expensive, but I think well worth it. It's saving me a ton of space in my house and preserved my photos at the same time. Prints don't last forever after all.
So I got rid of all of these (plus some more),

 

And now have just one box of photos and a disk. I  decided not to throw away all of my prints even though they are digital now. There is something to be said for the textile sensation of a photograph, especially one of good memories. I did however put them in one box, labeled and stacked by year.