Sounded great. Sort by category. Feel the joy or discard the rest.

She was fired up about how tidy her house looked and how she felt without the mess. Until she go to the part where she had to deal with her family photos. Not just the ones she’d taken, but those handed down for generations. Each picture brought back a memory and an emotion.

She struggled with getting rid of those precious items and asked me what to do.

There’s organizing information for everyday contemporary photo albums and then there’s advice for historic pictures. They’re not the same thing so the advice on caring for them should be different.

This recent organizing trend encourages folks to clean up their stuff tossing almost everything including photos.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for downsizing. I’ve done it myself. But when a multi million dollar-organizing expert tells her readers that “the correct method is to remove all your photos from their albums and look at them one by one” I have to speak up. no. No. NO.

This mega organizer doesn’t differentiate between your vacation albums and the ones put together by your ancestors. I’m sure she’d thinking about all those contemporary albums (digital and real) we’ve compiled, but she doesn’t clarify her advice for family history photos. Would you really toss pictures of great uncle Ben?

I believe that ever picture tells a story and a photo albums tells a tale of a person’ life.

One of my missions is to save those stories. Those images give us a connection to our past.

By sharing those pictures with our children we’re reinforcing family connections. In a disconnected world where family rarely lives next door, those images become valuable icons of who we are and why.

It’s time to rescue those historic albums from the current “too it” organizing mentality. Be a hero, save a family history picture or a whole album.

Touching the Past

Think about how you feel when you sit down with a photo album. If you’re like most people there is an instant connection with the person who took time to put it together.

By touching the pages and viewing the images, you know who and what was important to them. The paper feels different. They’re heavier and more substantial than a snapshot. And those old images come in all sizes–from tiny tin pictures to large card stock cabinet cards. Snapshots too. Blue, beige gold toned, and purple hued images stare out at you.

They beg you to answer the question: Who are these people?

We live in an image-based world surrounded by people taking pictures of every moment. For our ancestors, a visit to a photo studio usually marked a special occasion. Even candid pictures from the 1920s documents the everyday life of your great grandparents. They are pictorial moments worth treasuring.

Here are a few pieces of advice for dealing with albums old and new.

Your Albums: Weed the Present

We take more photos in one year than all the pictures ever taken in the 19th century. That makes the ones taken by your ancestors more special than that tenth shot you took of the Grand Canyon last year. Weed out of your own collection all those multiple shots of the same location. Choose special ones to save for your descendants.

Great Aunt May’s Albums: Save Them

Don’t touch those older bookish looking albums and those on black paper. They’re fine the way they are. Removing all those pictures usually damages the aged album pages, too.

And by taking them apart (as suggested by Ms. Kondo), you lose track of what goes where and destroy the context of the story contained in those images.

Who’s depicted? Who’s not? The placement of each picture in the album provides clues to the relationship of the person in the photo to the person who compiled the album.

A person I know took apart a black paper album to see if anything else was written on the back. (There was nothing there.) In their desire to see if their ancestor had written names on the back, the pictures got jumbled.

They didn’t photograph the pages first to be able to put it back together, so all the photos ended up in a pile and stayed there.

Laster, they found their aunt had kept a diary to go with the album. Together the album and the diary chronicled her travels as a young woman. Unfortunately the pile of pictures and the diary no longer fit together. Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again.

An Old School Toxic Combination

Unless you’re drowning in vacation photo albums, the only ones that really need to be taken part are the toxic creations sold beginning in the 1970s. Labeled as “magnetic,” they consist of poor quality paper, plastic, and glue.

Those gummy glue stripes or sticky pages grip onto pictures, leave behind yellow stains, and won’t cry uncle and let go. There are special techniques to remove those pictures safely. You’ll learn about them in my Essential Photo Organizing course. 

For now, put them aside with the intention that you’ll deal with those later.

Leave Them a Legacy

Take time to think about the photographic legacy you’re leaving your descendants. Pick significant images from your life and do what Great Aunt May did, put them in an album.

Give your heirs a picture story to cherish. By doing so, you’ve gotten rid of unnecessary stuff (the point of all good organizing advice), but kept the best for the future. Great Aunt May would be proud.

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