How Many?

How many pictures do you need to pass to the next generation? Will your children, grandchildren, and so on really want two hundred vacation pictures of beaches and other scenery that contain no image of a human? Will they really need fifty snapshots taken of a birthday party for a one-year old opening every gift?

Saving that one picture you have of your great-grandmother is one thing. Saving the three hundred negatives of pictures taken at a family barbeque may be something else. Saving the digital scans of those family barbeque pictures may be more manageable.

When you have a handful of images for a person, the decision to save is not difficult. When you have one photo of a great-great-grandparent, there is no decision: save. But when you have hundreds of images of one person (some of which may be very similar), how many slides, negatives, and photos can you save? How many can you realistically expect your children or grandchildren to continue saving after you are gone?

Just something to think about.

Yes, I am scanning my parents’ and grandparents’ negatives, slides, and pictures using a scanner I purchased. But there are more originals than I can potentially expect my children to keep in boxes and pass on to their children to keep in more boxes. What to save is something I have to keep in mind.

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