What do you do with photos and programs?

You can send them to friends/relatives who might be interested.

Also you can ask a museum or archives if they want them.

Thanks for your response @RedDeerGuy1. I appreciate the ideas. Are your suggestions based on what you do? My question is less about recommendations and more about finding out what people actually do with these things in their own lives.

@give_seek I keep them forever. Usually on my bookshelves. Or in a box in my closet. My mom has the rest.

That is why I keep asking for letters and not cards. When I am depressed I go through them. Have a good cry, and move on

OMG @RedDeerGuy1! That’s exactly what I do! My things are in an old small suitcase – programs, concert tickets, snippets of cat and dog hair in envelopes, cat collars, letters that must be 40 years old, birthday cards, obituaries, etc. About once every 5–10 years I go through them, allow myself to remember and miss everyone, cry, then put them back in the suitcase for another day. I’m just now thinking I ought to buy a pretty box to put them in rather than the suitcase. It must be 80 years old or even older. <sigh> But then I’d have to get rid of the suitcase and it, in and of itself, is a keepsake. Naahhh, no pretty box for me. ;)

Hope this helps, @give_seek. I vote that you keep the things.

@give_seek That made me think of the song “Photographs and Memories” by Jim Croce.

Photos of my friend’s children and funerals and the like get tossed.

I don’t keep them from the beginning. I don’t accumulate them.

Programs might last a week before I dispose of them. My memories are built over years and won’t fade.
Photos are the bane of my existence. Photography has been a hobby since my first SLR. I have scanned them all and then dispose.

I keep pictures that were from film cameras, because if not scanned they are gone forever. One of the few effects from my younger brother is a photo album of his daughter. I have kept it for her although she is estranged from the family, but I would like to give to her if she ever responds to us.

Programs pretty much get trashed. The only funereal one I have is from my mom’s service, and she is recently passed (last November). When we moved my mom out of her condo and into a board and care facility, we found boxes full of funeral programs and mass intentions for my dad’s passing. No one had looked in the box in almost ten years. All of it got sent to recycling.

You need to decide for yourself. You may be sorry for anything you throw away….going by your own comments here. Graduation, sports, and prom are not photo categories I would throw away, myself.

When my parents died, and we were going through stuff in the house, we found all kinds of old photos from way back when and we were certainly not going to discard them. There’s four of us children, so rather than argue who gets to have the pictures, and ultimately they will stay with somebody, but we’re going to scan them and then send out the electronic file to everyone so that they can have them to print out or look at on their computer as they wish. You could also do that with the programs, although some people like the original one. There was just no way to allow everybody to have the pictures all at once, and we didn’t want there to be any disagreement over certain ones that everybody might have wanted.

@zenvelo… Sorry to hear about your mom. My mom died in late 2021 and my dad had died earlier in the year. It’s really tough. My mom had saved quite a number of things over the years, and we did get rid of a lot of them because they didn’t mean anything to us, but even some of that stuff, we divided up amongst ourselves because we wanted to have something to remember her by. My dad was less prone to saving stuff like that although he had lots of old genealogy books and such down the basement.

I’ve really never kept photos. Sometimes I wish I had. I don’t often like to be photographed either.
I store everything in my memory. Maybe I’m worried that if I document important things, I will lose the ability to see them in my memorial. Nostalgia is a better painter than reality…

When I cleared out my mom’s home when she moved to assisted living, I only kept pics of family members. None of her friends’.