My father was a keen photographer. This was mostly before the days of digital cameras and definitely prior to mobile phones that included a camera. It is almost 24 years since Dad died and I wonder what he would think of camera technology today.

In fact, a large percentage of his photos were slides which he catalogued and stored meticulously. After his death we were left with an enormous collection of slides spanning 3 decades up until 1979. He generally had prints of photos after that time but it is the slides which I want to focus on in this post.

My mother, along with my siblings and I, realised that we could not continue to store these slides forever as they were not easy to access and view and their relevance would quickly fade with passing generations. While the slides were broadly catalogued, most of them did not identify specific individuals. We were all involved but Mum and my sister undertook the bulk of the work to do the first round of discards. This included any that were badly damaged, were of unknown places or people. The next step was to scan/digitise those which we felt could be worth keeping. Mum created digital folders for each of her 4 children containing copies of all of the photos which included that particular child. It is now nearly 4 years since Mum died and the responsibility for the preservation of the images from the slides passed entirely to me and my siblings.

I had all of the digital copies and my sister had all of the physical slides. When we were together at Christmas we went through them again to check that none had been missed in the scanning process. I then brought the slides home with me as I could see that there might have been some useful information on the frame of each slide, however, I needed a magnifying glass to check. This is what I have been working on intermittently for 2 weeks and that step is now completed.

I have cut each slide in half. I am not really sure why but it just feels better to have done this before discarding them in the bin and ultimately to landfill.

The next step is to curate the collection and choose the best photo where there are several of the person or group of people. I will make sure that each digital file includes the names of people in the photo as well as the location and date as best as I can ascertain. I will sort them into folders as part of my larger project to organise all of my photos.

I know that my children and grandchildren may not want to retain all of these photos, however, by doing this I will be providing them with an organised, curated collection with no expectation that they retain them. They will easily be able to see what they want to keep (if any) and discard the rest.

In the meantime, I am looking forward to enjoying some of these relics which have not seen the light of day for a long time and sharing the stories behind them with other family members.

This is a particular favourite – a style statement from a holiday in 1975.