After the funeral comes the house. The cupboards, the attic, the drawer under the bed. And somewhere among it all, the boxes: prints with a white border, albums with cardboard pages, a tray of slides, letters with photos tucked inside. It feels like a job you have to finish today. You do not. This article helps you do it in the right order.
The short answer
Throw nothing away in the first weeks. Gather everything in one place, sort it later in peace, and digitise before you divide: then everyone gets every photo, and the division is only about the originals. The photos on your parents' phone and computer do need attention soon. And write down who is in the photos, with the help of whoever recognises the faces.
Step 1: everything in one place
Photos are rarely in one spot. They are in albums, but also in envelopes from the photo shop, between books, in a biscuit tin, behind a frame, in a wallet. Walk through the house deliberately and put everything in one room or one large box. Also take what surrounds the photos: letters, memorial cards, funeral notices, old passports. Those help you find dates and names later.
Step 2: sorting without deciding
Make three piles, and do not decide yet what can go:
- People you know. Your parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, the neighbours from back then.
- People you do not know. Keep these until someone has seen them. This is often the most valuable pile.
- Duplicates and failed shots. Two copies of the same print, blurry photos, landscapes without people.
Do not take albums apart. The order and the captions in an album often tell you more than the photos themselves: which year, which occasion, who was there.
Step 3: digitise first, then divide
Between brothers and sisters, things often go wrong at the division. There is only one wedding photo of your parents, and three children who want it. The solution is simple: scan everything first, and give everyone a complete digital copy. Then the division is only about the originals, and that is a smaller conversation.
| Agreement | Why |
|---|---|
| Everyone gets all the scans | Nobody loses a photo because of the division. |
| Albums stay whole | The order and captions are information. |
| Whoever takes an original keeps it dry and dark | Prints fade in light and are damaged by damp. |
| One place where all the scans are kept together | Otherwise, in ten years, everyone has a different, incomplete folder. |
How to scan, at what resolution and in which file format, is explained in our article on digitising old photos.
The photos that are not in a box
Many photos from the last twenty years are not on paper, but on a phone, a tablet, an old computer or in the cloud. These need more urgency than the boxes. A phone nobody can unlock, or an account that disappears after a period of inactivity, takes those photos with it. Whether and how you can get to them depends on what your parent set up in advance. Our article on digital legacy explains how this works with Google, Apple and Facebook.
Once you have copied the digital photos, thememorypalace.ai/timeline shows how many photos there are per year, and which years stay empty. That way you see straight away whether a folder, a phone or a drive is still missing. The photos are not uploaded for this.
Start with the names
The part that disappears fastest is not the photo but the name that goes with it. Who is the man next to your grandfather at the village fair? Who is the girl with the plaits? Your parents knew. Their brothers, sisters and friends may still know. Take the "people you do not know" pile along when you visit, and write the names down straight away, in pencil on the back or in the description of the scan.
A damaged photo of someone who mattered can be restored for free and without an account at thememorypalace.ai/restore. The result states visibly that AI was used.
A place for what you found
A folder of scans on a computer is a start, but not a place where a family looks together. In The Memory Palace, you bring the photos, the names and the stories together in the rooms of a palace, and invite brothers, sisters and grandchildren to look and add to it themselves. Wings and rooms are private until you share them, and a full export is always possible, even on the free plan.