This is about travel photos. Also travel in time, through your old photos of holidays and weddings. Old photos start off being simply out of date but eventually become treasured historic photos.
1 Make sure each travel photo is labelled with the date, country, and the people shown.
Don't write on the back, especially not over faces or features. If you must write, write along the back of a white edging strip. Indentations of the tip of a pen such as a biro will show through. You can edit out shadows, but this is a time-wasting nuisance. I worked in a photo agency where we were taught to instead write on the back of a sticky label attached to the back.
Some sticky address labels lose their stikiness and dry out. Important photos of weddings often have a folded card covering the front or back, with the front protected by acide free tissue paper.
The label contents
Why do you need a label?
Let me tell you about two incidents.
1 Wedding Photos
a I went to the 80th birthday party of a distant relative. An elderly gentlemen produced a stack of photos of his family. Mostly people I did not know. People related by marriage. Poeple who died before I was born. Friends of people I hardly knew. People in the room when they were younger, hardly recognizable. I glanced at them and listened politely. This went on for five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes.
Then we reached the last half dozen. He said, "I don't know who these are. Don't supposed you know. You don't want to see them, do you?"
As they say, in for a penny, in for a pound. "Yes, I do," I replied, politely.
He said, "I've no idea who these people are."
I gasped, "That's my parents! I know my mother."
He said, "They are very smartly dressed, him in a top hat. I wonder what the occasion was."
I replied, "It must be their wedding. It's in the Forties. Before I was born."
He looked at it
"But she isn't in a white dress."
"No. She was a widow. Her fist husband died in a plane in the war in El Alamein, around 1941. In those days brides did not wear white to a second wedding. Besides, fabric was rationed. brides only wore white if they could afford, and obtain, white parachute silk. I don't suppose she would have wanted to wear parachute silk."
He blinked. I was blinking even faster.
He asked, "Would you like this photo. You don't already have the same one?"
"No. I've never seen it before. I'd be very glad to have it. Thank you so much."
If that photo had been labelled, it could have been easily identified, and maybe given to me much earlier.
As soon as I got home, I labelled the photo with my parents names, my mother's maiden name, their birth dates, wedding date, and death dates. When my son, or daughter-in=law, or grand-daughter, eventaully receive, inherit all my photos, I want them to know that picture is of the relatives, ancestors, and should be recorded and / or kept.
2 Funeral Photos
For my mother's funeral, and the reception afterwards, I wanted a good picture of her looking at her best, and happy. I meticously went throguh every photo in my father's three shoe boxes of family photos, mostly of holidays.
Most of the photos showed my mother full length, against a monument, with no close ups of her face. These were useful travel and history documents, although I had to ask my father to identify the places. Sometimes he could not remember. However, the unlabelled phtoto pile started to diminish as I matched up the clothes. If my mother had an identifying feature, a yellow dress, or a straw handbag and hat, in a photo which was beside a signpost or museum or landmark, the other photos with her in the same clothes were from the same holiday, the same place, the same year.
Sometimes a make of car would identify the country, or the decade.
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