weeding pictures

At one point, people were important enough that I took their picture.  Now, I can't tell you their last name.  One of today's (May 25th) projects was to weed out my pictures.  I spent about 90 minutes going through most of the photos from my first 25 years and deciding which to keep and which to throw away.

Back when we had film camera, I had prints that were blurry or bad pictures...ones today that I would never think of ordering, so it was easy to throw away those pictures.  What became difficult was how many and of who/what to keep.  Do I keep photos from elementary school when I don't talk to the girls in the photos with me?  What about high school or college?  I ended up keeping a handful of photos of people that were good friends at the time or ones that I genuinely looked happy or 'big' events like prom.  I think I left a nice variety over a nice stretch of time.  Essentially highlights of my teens.

Then it came to the two men I dated.  I was surprised to find that I had  more photos of them then I realized in albums and smiled that I did have something left of them.  Since there were prints, not digital, I figured I had to keep a handful of each of them too.  I am not sure why...but they were very important people to me in my 20s and again, I looked so happy in them. I was selective; keeping only about 10 or less of each.

Family pictures were tough.  I love my family.  Many photos were similar so I tried to keep a variety of age ranges and styles/looks over the years.  As our family grew, the more pictures I'd have to keep, and I love looking at pictures of the nieces/nephews as little kids and seeing how different they look now.

When digital pictures became the norm, I'd take several pictures of the exact same thing, because I could.  When I would scrapbook, I tried to be selective and chose some of the best pictures...but some times the trips or events would have so many photos and I wouldn't have enough room on the pages.  Storing digital photos is easy of course, but I'd print a lot out to use for scrapbooking...sorting through those will be a project for another day.