Before digital cameras, we used to take rolls and rolls of photos at a single event. Then we would have it all developed, often ordering duplicates (the photo shops all offered cheap deals to get doubles, after all). After the photos were developed, we would pick them up and rip open the envelope only to realize that… the lighting was bad that day… or we were using the wrong setting… or didn’t have it on autofocus. And we’d end up with two sets of dark, blurry photos. But, more often than not, we kept them.
We at Paper Moon Moves are giving you permission to toss all of these in the trash. And I will tell you why. Every photo is not a memory. In fact, sometimes having too many photos of the same event muddles the memory. One perfect picture goes a lot further than ten mediocre ones. And, somewhere, deep in those piles of too-dark, out-of-focus photos is the one really great photo. If you keep all of them, you may never be able to find it.
But if you discard all the bad ones, and save the good one, then you can enjoy it. You can put it in a special album full of great photos that make you happy; you can have it digitized and share it electronically with anyone you like, anytime; or you can save it on your phone or computer and look at it daily.
A lot of people worry about throwing photos away. It feels wrong to do so, somehow. But what we always try to remind people is that, when it comes to photos, less is better.
Elsie
Elsie was a lovely woman with a fascinating family history. She came from a prominent New England family that included some early American political leaders and people you learned about in elementary school, including a president.
This provided her a great sense of pride, but it also presented a problem. Because of her family roots, Elsie felt like she had to hold onto everything related to her family. And she had a tremendous amount of family photos and memorabilia. She had so much, in fact, that she had to rent a two-bedroom apartment so that one entire room could store the boxes and boxes of photos.
Elsie had us meet with her sister and a cousin, and we worked closely with Elsie’s sons. All four of them assured us that everything she was holding onto was a duplicate and that none of her photos and mementos were of any interest to any archives.
But Elsie never believed this. She always held out a fear that she would get rid of something that somebody, somewhere, would need in order to properly document the family history.
We moved her three times over the course of ten years and we emptied her final apartment after she died. So we got to know her quite well. With each move, we tried sorting with her to help her downsize some of the many photos and mementos, but she remained steadfast in holding onto it all.
In fact, she had us digitize a lot of photos – but she refused to discard the paper copies after spending money on digitizing services. And now, years later, all of this sits in a storage unit because her sons cannot bear to go against her wishes and dispose of any of it.
Denise
We helped Denise move to Boston to be near her kids and grandchildren. Like. Elsie, she also had boxes and boxes of photos. She had lost her husband when he was young. He had been a larger than life character, and there were a lot of family stories that revolved around him.
But Denise was much more realistic about her photos. She wanted to keep only a few – enough to fill one small album that she could keep handy and look at without hassle. She had us digitize a couple hundred photos – mostly photos of her kids and grandkids, and the family house that they all loved to visit on Shelter Island. She sent these photos to her kids so they could have fun looking through them.
The rest she tossed right into the trash. She could flip through twenty photos quickly and snatch only one or two to save or digitize. And I could see she was saving only really good photos. If there were fifteen shots from the same birthday party in 1985, she would quickly focus in on the one shot that told a good story.
So now, if Elsie’s kids want to see family photos, they have to look through many memory sticks and wade through all the photos she had digitized. Or visit the storage unit and start opening boxes. Just the thought of trying to sort through it all probably prevents them from even considering it.
Meanwhile, if Denise’s kids want to see family photos, they just pick up the album she keeps near her sofa, and within seconds they are happily seeing the memories that she wanted to preserve for them.
Sorting photos takes time, so you need to commit to the project. Put a two or three hour photo sorting appointment in your calendar. When the time comes, take out a portion of your collection – maybe one album or one small box of loose photos. Now search for good photos. Make it a hunting expedition. Tell yourself you only want to find the best ones. As you search, put just the photos that have meaning in one pile. This is your keep pile.
Put the rest into a big pile which we’ll call purgatory. The purgatory pile is the pile you plan to discard, but I recommend keeping it for another few days before you do so.
At the end of the session, make another appointment to sort again a few days later. At that point, take a quick look at the purgatory pile and then toss it in the trash (or shred the photos, if you are worried about neighbors coming across anything private). Then take out the next box of photos and repeat the whole process: look for the really good photos and save those; discard the rest. It’ll probably take some time but the process can be fun and even moving. Plus, you’ll be so happy when you have an organized photo collection.
