How do you dispose of unwanted printed photos - shred, bin,

My heart literally skipped a beat reading this. I’m going to step out now and never come back to this thread, so I don’t have to hear about the various ways people are destroying photos. 🥴

Your photo quality must be infinitely better than the ones I inherited - so out of focus, random people in them, and let’s not even discuss the photos that were welded together because they weren’t stored properly over the years (heat).

Or photos from the days of Target giving you 2.or 3 copies of the same photo.

I just tossed them. I didn’t feel the need to shred.

I don’t have a problem just throwing away duplicates or just plain crap photos (poorly lit or blown out, blurry, no real subject/landscapes, etc.) especially if there are a few from the group that better tell the story that I am keeping. Like for the birthday party example, as long as you capture the story and keep the best ones, I see no point in keeping a hundred similar pictures when there are 10-15 that tell the story best.

If there is someone who might want the extras, I’d for sure ask if they want me to pass them along (especially if there is someone who lost all their own photos to flood, fire, etc.) before throwing them out. I recently found a huge pile of my sister’s photos in my basement. I don’t talk to her (or want to) but I’m contemplating just putting them in a box and mailing them to her so she can have them back without me having to engage her personally.

Some I shredded simply because the subject matter was not something I wanted to remember (ex, bad period in high school, etc) and destroying them felt good.

Excess copies, crappy photos got tossed. My dad is dumping photos on me. I'm trying to keep the ones I want or have a connection to. The rest are going to be weeded out and tossed.

I can't imagine shredding them. I have thrown away some photos but mostly I keep them. I have so few photos from my childhood that photos are really precious to me. Also, we lost all of our early digital photos that had not been printed. We were not careful enough about backing them up.

Please do take precautions to be sure your backups are secure. If you are storing online, someone else needs to know what service you are using and the password. If there is a fee for storage, be sure others know about this as well so they can maintain these photos if something happens to you. It isn't pleasant to think about but as we are storing more and more data online, these storage systems need to be part of our own estate planning.

I was looking at some vacation photos from 1995 and the photo quality was sooooo bad that I did think of getting rid of them.

In the film days, when I took five or ten photos and hoped for at least one good one in the bunch, then tossed the rest. I tore them into little pieces and put them in the trash.
Any extra photographs (double set) were given to others. Often time requests for copies were made.

These days, thanks to digital (camera and phone), viewing photos right away means one can delete and retake immediately, as well as only print the photographs that I like and will use in my scrapbook.........so there isn't anything to toss.

Old photographs(from childhood or that I inherited from a Grandparent), that I didn't scrapbook are in a decorative hatbox. 

The only "good" photographs that I tossed(ripped to shreds while cursing my abusive ex-husband), were my Wedding photographs. I saved one photograph and me and my Step-Father)...because I didn't have any of just the two of us),
The ripping up of the photographs was a cathartic  emotional and mental release, done as a part of my healing.

I generally tear them into strips with my hands. Back in the days when I ran a photo lab we religiously shredded any prints we had to discard because there had been incidents in the past with a man dumpster diving and pulling out photos of families and taking them. People are creepy.

For duplicates or bad photos, I just toss them in the trash.

I scrapped the ones I liked, The kids got some they wanted and the rest I tossed. I do have all of them on CD, on my 'puter and on a thumb drive.

Love this!

I felt that way looking back at all the pictures we took on our honeymoon in Hawaii in ‘89. So many of them were SO bad. Since I started scrapbooking I quickly came to the realization that scenic photos are really best left to the professionals so now I just look for nice postcards instead of trying to capture it myself. My photos never do the real thing justice especially when I can just buy one for a buck or less.