Sorting photos

My ex-husband and I were pretty bad at keeping control of photos as a couple - they were just piled away in a cupboard.  When I moved out, I didn't take any.  My daughter brought a few that she had found when looking through them a couple of years later.  But I had not steeled myself to contact N to arrange to tackle the cupboard.

But a couple of weeks ago, N emailed me to tell me that he had been sorting photos, and would I like to collect some.  I arranged to go up there yesterday.  The last email of the exchange should have forewarned me - in fact, N had done very little sorting, he had simply got some of them out of the cupboard and left them in a pile on the floor.  

So I set to, and spent 5 hours  sifting through thousands of photos, mainly of cars and car rallies, picking out photos I wanted to keep.  By the time I finished, I had 4 boxes of photos (mainly of the kids when younger), the cupboard was pretty much empty, and those I had rejected were neatly haphazardly piled on the floor.  The blip doesn't really give you an idea of the size of the pile, as there is little depth to it.

We nearly always had double runs of photos when we had them processed - it was cheaper than subsequently picking out and getting duplicates of those that we wanted to pass on.  But the 2 separate runs were to a large extent NOT together in the cupboard or in the pile on the floor.  So I found myself looking through one folder of photos, then half an hour later, looking through the same photos again.

The next job is to sort them again, and prioritise which ones I want to scan and keep.  I still have a couple of large boxes of dad's photos that I am supposed to be sorting.  I think it might be a job for next year!