What to Do With Old Family Photos

Start by deciding what the photographs are for

The boxes feel overwhelming because they are trying to be three things at once: an archive of the family, a source of pictures to enjoy, and a pile of stuff in the way. Separate those jobs and the work becomes calm. The archive job is to make sure the photographs survive and can be found. The enjoyment job is to get the best of them onto walls and into hands. The clutter job is to decide, at the end and not the beginning, what does not need keeping.

One rule makes everything easier: digitise before you decide. Once a photograph is scanned and backed up, every later choice, whether to frame it, share it or let the print go, becomes reversible. If you are facing years of family photos rather than a single box, our companion guide on what to do with hundreds of family photos goes into the sorting method in more detail.

What to do with boxes of old family photos: sort first

Do not scan a box you have not sorted. An afternoon of sorting saves a week of scanning. Work on a large table, in good light, with the eldest relative who can still name people sitting beside you if at all possible.

1. Make four piles: keep and scan; scan only (blurry, duplicated, but with someone in it); scenery and nobody in it; and unknown. Most families find a surprising share of the box is the third pile: the 1983 view from a hotel balcony, twelve near-identical shots of a sunset.
2. Group the keep pile by decade, roughly. Clues are on the back (processing dates, shop stamps), in the print format (square prints for the 1970s, glossy 6 x 4 for the 1990s) and in the haircuts.
3. Write on the back in soft pencil, never pen: who, where, roughly when. This is the single most valuable thing you will do, and it can only be done while someone remembers.
4. Leave albums intact. An album is a story someone told; scan its pages in order rather than pulling the prints out. Old magnetic self-adhesive albums are the exception: their glue damages prints over time, so those photographs should come out, gently, with dental floss slid behind them if they stick.

Scanning old photographs: apps, scanners and DPI

You have two good options and one bad one. The bad one is photographing prints with a phone camera in normal mode, which gives you glare, keystone distortion and a picture of a picture.

A phone scanning app

Free apps such as Google PhotoScan and Photomyne are made for exactly this. They remove glare by combining several captures, crop each print automatically and, in Photomyne's case, can capture several prints on a page at once. Quality is good enough for sharing, for photo books and for most reprints at the original size. A family can scan an album in an evening this way, and it is the right choice for the scan-only pile and for anything you mainly want to share.

A flatbed scanner

For the keep pile, and for any print you might want to enlarge, use a flatbed. Scan at 300 dpi to reprint at the same size, and at 600 dpi for small prints (anything under 10 x 15 cm) or anything you might enlarge or restore. Save as JPEG at high quality for everyday use, or TIFF for the handful of irreplaceable ones. Negatives and slides need a scanner with a film holder, or a scanning service; at 2,400 dpi or more they often give better results than the faded prints made from them.

A scanning service

For thousands of prints, or for negatives and slides, a scanning service is often worth the cost. Ask for at least 600 dpi, ask how they handle originals in transit, and send a small test batch first. Keep the sorting and captioning for yourself; nobody else can do it.

Name the files as you go

A file called 1976-08_cornwall_gran-and-dad.jpg can be found in ten years. IMG_4471.jpg cannot. Put the year first so folders sort themselves. If the app allows captions, use them.

Storing the originals and the scans

Prints last best where people are comfortable: cool, dry, dark and stable. Not the loft, which bakes in summer, and not the garage, which is damp. Use archival, acid-free boxes and sleeves rather than shoeboxes and elastic bands, keep prints flat, and store negatives separately in their own sleeves.

For the scans, follow the simple 3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two kinds of storage, one of them somewhere else. In practice that means the files on your computer, a copy on an external drive, and a copy in a cloud library such as Google Photos, iCloud or a similar service. Cloud services also make the next step, sharing, almost automatic.

Sharing old family photos with relatives

This is where the work pays off, and where it stops being your job alone. The method that works for families spread across cities and countries:

• Open one shared album in Google Photos or iCloud, or a shared cloud folder, and send the link to every branch of the family: siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, the old family friends. Ask them to add what they have as well as to look, and to add it directly rather than through messaging apps, which compress images.
• Ask for captions in the comments. Relatives will name people you could not, correct your dates, and add the stories. A great-aunt's comment under a 1950s photograph is a family history in one line.
• Decide who holds the originals. Usually one person per branch, in archival boxes, with the whole family knowing where they are. Because everything is scanned, this no longer causes arguments.
• Give each household its own copy of the scans on a drive or by sharing the album with download rights. If a house floods or a phone is lost, the family still has everything.

Families often find this album is the first time three generations have looked at the same photographs together, and that the looking becomes an event in itself. If you are gathering after a loss, our guide to remembering grandma and grandpa covers the same gathering with a gentler pace.

Displaying them: getting the best ones out of the box

A photograph in a box is preserved; a photograph on a wall is loved. Choose a handful and let them be seen.

• A gallery wall of the decades. Nine to twelve prints in matching frames, one or two from each decade, hung in a grid. Reprint from the scans and keep the originals in the archive. A4 frames with a mount suit most old prints.
• The one great photograph, enlarged. A 600 dpi scan of a small print will often enlarge cleanly to 30 x 40 cm. Have it restored first if it is faded; the difference is startling.
• A rotating frame. A single frame by the kettle whose picture you change every month keeps the archive in circulation. Children love choosing the next one.
• A digital frame that relatives can send to. Loaded with the shared album, it shows the 1962 wedding beside last week's school play, which is what a family looks like.

Making something lasting from old family photos

Once the photographs are scanned and shared, they become material. Three things families make from them, in rising order of ambition:

A photo book per decade or per person

A printed book of the best sixty to a hundred photographs, captioned, with a copy for every household. Books are cheap to reprint, sit on shelves, and are the format grandchildren actually pick up.

A photo mosaic portrait made from all of them

This is the one gift that uses the whole archive rather than a selection. One portrait of a person, or of a couple, is composed from hundreds of the family's photographs: every decade, every holiday, every grandchild. From across the room it is their face; up close, every tile is a moment someone remembers. It suits a milestone birthday, a golden anniversary or a gift for grandparents from the grandchildren, and because it is printed from the scans, each household can have its own copy. Our page on a photo gift for grandparents explains what to gather and how one is made, and the shared album you have just built is precisely the preparation it needs.

A family calendar

Twelve old photographs, one per month, printed as a calendar for every household each Christmas. It is modest, it is annual, and it keeps the archive alive year after year.

If nobody in the family wants them

Sometimes the honest answer to what to do with old family photos is that no one has room, and no one is very interested. That is allowed. A few things make letting go easier and kinder:

• Scan first, then decide. A digitised box takes up no space, and interest often arrives a generation later. The grandchild who shrugs at twenty will ask at forty.
• Keep a curated hundred. One archival box of the best and most significant prints, captioned, is a manageable inheritance. The rest can go once it is scanned.
• Offer the rest before recycling it. Local history societies and archives are often glad of street scenes, shopfronts, uniforms and workplaces; photographs of unknown people from the 1920s and 1930s have a small but real market with collectors and researchers. Photographs with nobody in them can simply be recycled with a clear conscience.

A realistic timeline

For a typical family box or a few albums: one afternoon to sort and caption with an elder, one or two evenings to scan with a phone app, an hour to back up and open the shared album, and then a couple of weeks while relatives add their own. Framing, a book, or a portrait made from the whole set takes a few weeks more, so if the photographs are being gathered for a birthday or an anniversary, start six weeks ahead. The archive will outlast every device it is stored on; the point of the work is that the people in it get looked at.

Questions families often ask

What DPI should I scan old family photos at?

Scan at 300 dpi to reprint a photograph at its original size, and at 600 dpi for small prints (under 10 x 15 cm) or anything you might enlarge or restore. Negatives and slides need 2,400 dpi or more and usually give better results than the faded prints made from them. Phone scanning apps are fine for sharing and books; use a flatbed for the irreplaceable ones.

What is the best way to share old family photos with relatives?

Open one shared album in Google Photos or iCloud, or a shared cloud folder, and send the link to every branch of the family, asking them to add their own photographs directly rather than through messaging apps, which compress images. Invite captions and corrections in the comments, and make sure each household downloads its own copy of the full set.

What should I do with old family photos that nobody wants?

Scan them first, so the decision is reversible, then keep one archival box of the best hundred, captioned. Offer street scenes, workplaces and uniforms to a local history society or archive, and consider collectors for very old photographs of unknown people. Prints with nobody in them, and duplicates, can be recycled once they are digitised.