Piles of Photos! Gone Digital! HELP

Are all of the pictures scanned? If so, will other family members appreciate having them?

I’m not against tossing photos I don’t need but I understand everyone may not feel this way.

Let me know when you've worked it out!   I stopped paper scrapping over ten years ago, and I still have shoe boxes full of digital photos that I had printed out to scrap. I cannot bring myself to throw them out just yet. Maybe in another ten years I will be able to! 

For my personal photos and extra school pics etc... I offered them to my kids and tossed what they didn't want (all have been scanned if pre-digital)

For inherited photos? I choose (after discussions with my sister and children) not to keep slides or panoramics after scanning. MOST of the others are stored roughly chronologically in the 16 box Iris photo boxes and the Iris 5x7 photo boxes (which have 6 boxes). Oversized or very old photos are stored in archival boxes. I'm slowly making sure all photos that I can identify with a date/place/names of people ARE identified. I'm working backwards from 2019 (which is when my mother died) and am now on 1975 - labelling both the physical photo and the digital ones.

Once I'm done with hers, I need to do the same with the much smaller collection from my MIL - which I primarily have in digital (scanned) form as after scanning, I passed many on to nieces and nephews. I do have some physical photos from that side and will store similarly to my mum's.

DH's photos - I've offered to scan, offered to help him label and/or organise and for the most, that hasn't happened yet. Every so often he digs a photo or two out to show someone and I take that opportunity to scan and label.

I wouldn't tackle them as an all or nothing collection. Go through them and see, are any actually trash? That might be photos that give you a bad feeling or shots that aren't actually something anyone wants to remember. Are any blurry or duplicates? Those might be easy to trash right now. Are there any that you know for sure the kids will have fun with right now? Hand them over to them and enjoy them enjoying them. Any feel so precious you could never throw them in the bin ever (even knowing you have digitals)? Put them back in the box.

At that point you might've reduced the collection down a bit and you have a better sense of what you've got. If at this point you're feeling like it's too much to consider trashing them (and you have space) put them back in the photo box and walk away. You don't even have to organize them if you don't want to. Or if it's the opposite, you're thinking what's the point, throw them away. 

I personally have a photo box full of loosely sorted random photos in my closet and a slip-in album with random photos of family members on my bookshelf. Many are photos people have sent to me that aren't so important that I want to scan them but are nice. If something happened to the entire internet and computer systems I would be glad to have what I have in physical form. Not that I think that likely, but I have the space, and it can be nice to look through paper photos. But when I do look through them I try not to see them as a collection of photos I have to keep and if any make me feel icky or pointless I trash them. 

Each time I get the box out (every 3 years or so?) I throw more away as I realize they don't matter to me any more. I don't mind that they're not organized very much but labeling the back consistently is something I aspire to. I also have no descendants so even though I do family history I don't feel obliged to anyone.