What To Do With Your Family’s Old Photo Albums?
There’s a strange reality coupled with technological advances that fundamentally changes how we live and how we view things from the past. Not that anyone intended to change how things used to be, it is just a side effect of the advances. Just as folks didn’t need horses once the car was introduced, or washing boards once the washing machine became a common household item. Today one of the most obvious changes is internet and online shopping, and the end of malls. Who would have believed that? Because there’s a huge marketplace with often better deals online, the hassle of driving to, parking at, walking through, and spending money at stores in a mall is quite simply outdated. Why do that when you can just type commands on a search query line through something like Amazon, find a thousand of what you want extremely cheap, and have them shipped them to your doorstep?
Digital Photography And The Outcome
While the internet has made things more convenient, it has also erased other meaningful and even valuable aspects of daily life that were once common place. Digital photography has totally changed how we take, manage, and store pictures. In the world of yesteryear, family photos were kept in photo albums. Today, digital photos can be kept online and reprinted a million times.
Consequently the photo album is a bit outdated, (though smart people still print the best photos and make selective albums) and folks who care about passing those photos on will in any case have the best ones scanned and saved digitally. Additionally, any photos one cares about need to be placed in a new archival album to preserve the photos. So what do you do with those old albums once you’ve removed the photos? Surely you don’t just throw them out? Here, we’ll explore a few different ideas for organizing those old albums in order to upcycle, or if necessary toss!
Above: an example of putting precious family photos in an album that will protect them
Repurpose Old Photo Album Books
Photo albums out of the eighties and nineties were huge three-ring binders capable of holding anywhere from three to sometimes five inches of laminate pages. Essentially, the pages would be secured on the rings in the binder, and pictures would be slid into the sleeves of those pages, then organized as fit the owner’s preferences.
Well once you’ve digitally scanned all your pictures onto a computer, those binders and those sleeves can be used in other ways. For example, an old photo album can be a perfect way to keep printed technical specifications that came with all your appliances. Maybe an auto manual could be put in there, or several?
Of course, it depends on the photo album. Some are open, and basically just a big binder. Others can be closed and sealed with buttons or a zipper; some have leather bindings. For those that can be sealed, you could also turn them into a container. Remove the pages, partition the inside, and use the old album to store valuables like hard cash, gold, or jewelry in a way that is disguised, and placed in your book shelf.
Recipe File
Recipes in a printed cookbook are hard to work with and the book will likely get bits of flour, sauce, and food on it, damaging its contents. Save your cookbooks, and using the old photo album, you can put copies of your favorite recipes in laminated sleeves. Essentially, just print them, stick them in the sleeves, and voila. It doesn’t matter if a bit of marinara sauce gets on a page; it’ll wipe right off. Plus, five-inch binders can hold quite a few recipes!
The Wall Collage
How many photo albums do you have? If you’ve got say twenty of them, you could mount them all on a wall facing you in a pattern, creating interesting and interactive décor! Depending on what the pages are made of, you may or may not be able to keep all the content in the album, but if the pages are cardboard, you may be able to. Just make sure to reinforce the spine from the inside so it will stand up to being looked at while mounted vertically.
Twenty albums properly mounted close together, with knobs used as handles to open them, could make an entire wall seem as though it were made of photo albums. You keep hard copies of the pictures on a disk, then enjoy a wall of albums that certainly will make one room in your house a true conversation piece.
Making Old Photo Albums Into Something New
Zero Waste offers a few other ideas for photo album repurposing. At the end of the day, whether you make a recipe file, an ambitious wall collage, or simply re-purpose old albums as storage items, there are worthwhile things which can be done with those big old binders. Use your imagination, and find a way of putting them to use rather than adding them to the landfill!
