My mom shredded all the duplicates. My sibling thought she shredded most of her pictures but when she passed away, there were so many pictures!
Mom was very organized.
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When we downsized I kept 1 of each photo and threw away the rest. I think my kids will scan that photo if they want a copy in the future. I had envelopes for each child that had multiple sizes of the school photo for each year- way too many to keep. I should mention that I am not a big picture taker and don’t spend time looking at old photos or videos. I like to frame my favorites and add them to the collection on our grand piano (it holds a lot of photos).
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I used to put my duplicate photos in a bowl and leave it on the coffee table when the kids were little. The kids loved to look at them and even use them for crafts or to make “family books”, cut out faces and make refrigerator magnets (you can buy magnet strips that you can cut to size ) with them or bookmakers ….and I didn’t care what happened to them!
Maybe your grandkids would like them for any of the above!
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During Covid, my husband and I made a project of making an album of all the various kiddie/school portraits and a few family portraits. (Not including framed ones around the house.) For now I kept the duplicates in a bag.
Photos are my bete noire.
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When I weeded through my photos all the dups went into the recycling bin. I also got rid of redundant pictures - three pictures of the same birthday celebration with the same people - just kept the best one.
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I have albums of each year school picture 8x10 for each kid, but it seems I always had to get a package with other sizes. In the past couple of years I made a box for each kid and put in one of the other school pictures for each year, as well as a selection of other photos. H loved to take pictures. Still does. I’m very thankful for the cloud. But back in the day he’d almost always order duplicate prints when developing in case I wanted to send to grandparents. I sent about .001% to grandparents. I divided the best ones into their boxes, as well as a box for me, and shredded the rest. I hate seeing piles of old photos of people for sale at thrift and vintage stores or flea markets so I always shred. Haven’t done anything with the CDs, thumb drives, sd cards filled with photos yet. The boxes stop around 2010.
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Found boxes of N95 masks that have been lying around the house and in the cars. Enough boxes to fill a shopping bag, which will be tossed in the garbage.
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A neighborhood friend with a car took me with a gigantic bag of miscellaneous stuff to a charity store at the other end of my neighborhood. Good riddance.
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Tomorrow is our neighborhood BN group’s annual free sale and I’m on the map. Just put your stuff outside and hope it disappears! I have a lot of odds and ends, hope it all goes.
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It poured yesterday but I put the Free Sale stuff out on my covered porch and some things went. Several of us put stuff back out today. A few more things gone!
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Has anyone found a reliable, good quality company to convert old family viseo tapes into digital? I have some 30+ years old from when my son was a toddler - this is a huge downsizing/clean out the stuff component (for me). If I could get these tapes (and some photos) digitized I’d feel a lot better about chucking some of the other stuff!
Did throw some old art projects from daughter’s elementary days out, today. Getting there!
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Costco is affiliated with a service.
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My photos are a mess. We had old VHS home videos put on CD many years ago by a local person. Each time we have had to evaluate I tell myself I need to do something about the photos. Many are in albums but the albums are falling apart.
I want to get back into the clean out mode. Next up is my laundry room cupboards. I keep reminding myself if it’s been in a cupboard on a top shelf for 40 years it should go. We have a large glass jar of small shells my husband collected when he was a teenager. The lid is rusted and the jar has sat inside the cupboard as long as I can remember in this house which is over 29 years.
I think my refrigerator is also due for a condiment cleanout.
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Thanks @oldmom4896 I will check that out!
My husband took this on as a retirement project. We still had one working video camera at the time. He hooked it up to his laptop with a very cheap gadget he bought on Amazon. The key is, he went through all those hours of tape and only digitized/saved the highlights. So sometimes a full video ended up with only a couple of minutes being kept. Honestly, just digitizing everything would probably still have me stressed knowing I had tons of hours of stuff and no way to find the “good stuff”.
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I recently discovered our library has all the equipment available to do this!
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This is timely as just yesterday I started a project to go through 1.5 fileboxes full of videotapes with no labels. I hooked up an old vcr and although the sound doesn’t seem to be working I can see whats on them. Mostly this is to reassure H who fears getting rid of anything important. So far one is an interview with someone I’m saving for H to identify who it is. One tape got eaten. One is a movie filmed in our town that long ago only rarely appeared on tv so one time we taped it. I looked and it’s now available streaming in four places. Four more are kids shows taped off the tv c2005. The commercials are fun to watch. So thats 6 to get rid of to 1 keep so far. I’d already weeded the labeled ones, saving birthday parties, etc. Then I’ll need to decide what to digitize.
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My big project after retirement (in Jan this year) is to declutter my house. I spoke with a friend who cleaned out her house before downsizing. She said it took her two years to complete her project!!
While I do not plan to sell my house, I would like to get rid of as many unwanted and un-needed stuff as possible. I am in MA. Fresh Start Furniture Bank is a go-to donation location for our furniture and other household items they look for.
I’ve taken frequent trips to Savers and Goodwill for many other items. Coats, jackets, comforters and blankets have been donated to a local homeless shelter. My friends have been recipients of several items, some were brand new and still in the original boxes.
8 months in, I still have a long way to go. Just today, I dropped off two more boxes of Christmas decorations at Savers. I feel good whenever I make these donations or simply give things away to friends.
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I converted our video tapes to digital about ten years ago. Was a long process - we had lots and lots of tapes. Our original camcorder wasn’t working anymore, so I ended up buying one on ebay and using it to play the tape while connected to my computer and a hard drive. Then a few years ago, I moved all this video to the cloud (google cloud). I did end up buying a google one subscription since I have so much data!
For both kids’ 21st birthdays, I made them short videos of each year. Well, for my D I was abl to do this for the first 18 years. For S, I got through only 5. We were taping so much by then that it was hard to go through it all. I plan on doing it sometime!
Also on the plans are specific highlights - all their sports reels, all their different musical recitals etc. This will take me forever 
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