It hits close to home because my grandmother left me over 100 photo giant albums that I'm in the process of digitizing because 1) they are rotting away and 2) they take up an entire wall and if I don't do this, they're just going to be trashed.
Yeah, definitely. Digitize it then keep all the precious photos in a sealed box that's water proof. Collect annotations from your family and layout the pages with the annotations alongside the photos. Print it all in C2S and bind it in hardcover. Oh, and have someone particularly sentimental in your family write an introduction.
In my case, I'm on the fence about photos and photo albums in general. I ended up with about dozen large albums from my parents after they died - in addition to a bunch of my own albums from 20-30 years ago. All just taking up space in storage boxes in my basement.
On the one hand, it does bring back fond memories of parties, holidays, long-gone relatives, etc. But on the other hand, so many of them are repetitive, same people, same holidays, just different year. Maybe it made some sense when the events and people were recent, but literally nobody is going back to look at them now. My albums haven't been out of that box in over 15 years, and I'm sure mom's albums will end up the same way.
I know mom would sometimes sit down and flip through her old photos, reminiscing and "living in the past" as she tended to do, but that's not really my thing. Part of me regrets getting sucked into all that wasteful expense at a time when I couldn't really afford it, and ending up with thousands of photos shoved into albums that no one cares about any more.
And now the thought of spending countless hours digging through ~60 years of photos just to digitize a handful of them fills me with dread. More time spent, and for what? The past 20 years of my photos are already digital and nobody looks at those either, except the few I post on Facebook.
