Photos/snapshots before cell phone cameras

I took lots of photo with film from when I was young. I had one of those Kodak Instamatic camera. My dad had a Nikon film camera. I even took photography in college and developed and printed my own photos.

I don’t use film anymore but I still print out photos. I just print out the best ones that I like the most.

Even if you print out photos for people, the younger generation seems more likely to scan them and toss the originals. I know several younger people who have all their old photos scanned and saved digitally. They didn’t keep the original print.

I have always taken lots of photos prior to cell phones. I had the canon AE1 film camera ( still have it ) and my dad was a prolific photographer. Photos of him at college ( Annapolis), on his tours, and of course family. They are all on slides and I am slowly going through and scanning them. My mom, too, took quite a bit of photos as a young single woman. Sadly I don’t recognize some people in the photos but they are posing with her dog. It was a man with a little girl and my mom’s dog. My cousins have no idea either. Up until the past few years, my photos have all been organized by date, with notations as to who is who and where we are. I’ve slowly been doing that with my parents otherwise my kids will be “who is this, what’s their story?”

Well I’m really, really old - so yes to film cameras. My family was pretty poor, so there are not very many photos. I was a teenager when my parents got me a Kodak Instamatic of some kind. It was the type that used the flash cubes and 126 film. I actually met my DH when he was working behind the counter of a camera store. I took some family photos from vacation in to be developed. And the rest, as they say, is history.  He grew up with a dad that was really into photography and so he’s been shooting since he was in his early teens. He still has his first SLR - a Canon AE or AE-1 and those split image focusing lenses  I loved those things. I’ve learned everything I know about photography from him. We’ve gone from film cameras, to DSLR’s, and are looking in to Mirrorless.

We have boxes and boxes of photographs of our own and inherited about 13 boxes of photos, slides and movies from my late in-laws. I also have a handful of photo albums that were my grandmothers and my parents. They are very precious to me.

Right now everything is in our (finished) basement. Whenever my DH totally retires, our goal is to go through all of these pictures and digitize them. I believe there are some undeveloped rolls of film in those boxes. Trying to find someplace when the time comes to send them off to be developed, should be interesting.

This is what I posted here back in May of 2021 about my "Covid Photo Project"--


I started about this time last year (of course) with about 40,000 photos. This included 11 shoebox-sized boxes (per google it's about 1000 per box) so 11,000; 30 large albums of about 300 photos each = 9000; 12,000 photos on my phone plus many, many smaller albums plus tons (almost) of loose photos. I am not exaggerating when I say 40,000 photos.

So I went through every single photo and purged. Then I did it again. Oh, and getting some of the photos out of those old "magnetic" albums after decades is a real pain. Maybe 10%(at most) of the non-iphone photos had dates on the back either when they were developed, when they were taken (some of my 1990's photos had this) or when I had written the date on the back.

I sent these off to be scanned--the ones with dates on the back I wrote with a small sharpie on the front (only thing I could do), then my son did his magic to get these onto google photos.

Then I went in and dated every single photo (to the best of my knowledge). Some are off by years, maybe more--but who will know!! Then I tagged them but after I started, google knew who they were so it got easier. I also put the location on almost all and a comment on many.

At times I was really picky--I cross-referenced with my scrapbook albums that had dates on. (My son wants me to work on getting those digitalized. I looked into it and it would cost about $100 per album to do. I think I'll wait until the next pandemic for that... (sorry, not really trying to be funny about that).

Of course the iphone ones were a lot easier.

So I went down to 7414 photos from 40,000 photos! Dates are 1933-present.


And I have much more room in my closets now. They took up sooo much room. I'm surprised that the weight of them did not break the shelves. It is really a good feeling to have done this!! My kids will have these photos forever! I told them if Google goes out of business, they are on their own! I am so happy that I can look up a certain kid, parent, certain year, certain place etc, and right away get the photos. But it was many, many hours of work. Now going forward it will be so easy! Now for a glass of wine!

This is the project I am in the middle of.  I've always taken pictures and so did my mom and grandmother.  So I have a lot of photo albums that are taking up a lot of room.  I am slowly going through all our old albums, scanning photos and putting them in photo boxes.  I sometimes toss some of the really bad photos but for the most part, I'm keeping the photos for now but want a digital copy as well.  I am uploading the scanned and edited photos to a photo sharing site, putting information about each photo and sharing with family.  

When I married at 21, I began using our Canon AE -1 , especially to take photos of my growing family. When they were pre-teens I began to take their portraits every year rather than buy the overpriced and terrible school photos. This led to me gradually becoming a professional, first shooting film, and later digital.

When my marriage ended and I lost my house, I had to go through boxes and boxes of prints. I ended up with a small mountain of rejects and replicas, and blinks galore.

I still believe in printing anything you want to have a copy of 10, 20, 30 years down the road. I have a daguerreotype of my great grandmother from the 19th century that’s been passed to me and I treasure it. It would be sad if that technology from the 1800’s lasts, and ours doesn’t.