How many photos are we talking about?
One photo-industry estimate puts the average family photo collection at about 10,000 printed photos.
If your parents have six well-organized scrapbooks, you may have no action to take to support their memories. You can focus on capturing today's memories.
If your parents have ten boxes of unlabeled photos, VHS tapes, and flash drives containing photos, you need a plan.
If your parents have boxes and peeling photo albums, and your aunt has framed photos that smell like cigarette smoke, and your grandpa left you slides and film reels, you probably need external help.
But also, you don't need to save them all. The greatest gift you can give is to curate down to fewer photos, less variety of media, and a format that will be easy to preserve and access into the future.
Get the thousand words
Your parents may enjoy looking at photos and telling stories in different ways over time. You can capture your family history orally, in writing, or just in your mind while your parents are inspired by the photos. If you're interested in genealogy, you might pull up Ancestry.com and update it as part of your photo reviews.
As your parents get older, they may also find photos a great way to reflect on their childhood memories. They may enjoy the older photos and tell the same stories, which can feel good for them. It is kindest not to point out if they repeat themselves.
What is your role?
There are many ways your parents need help during their lives, but the photos can wait. Work on the photos if they bring you joy. They offer an opportunity to enjoy time with your parents and to get information from them about your relatives.
Technology opportunities with digitization
Digitizing can make photographs easier to share and protect against the loss of a single original. Two easy ways to convert print photos into digital are a flatbed scanner and taking photos of them. Scanning can lead to higher resolution, but cell phone photos sure are faster! They also work well for delicate photo albums. And today's cell phone cameras have very good resolution. The efficiency of this method is worth considering. Paying a service to digitize a box full of photos can cost as little as $.20 per photo. No matter who or how the capture is done, it’s much faster if you capture just a subset of the photos.
Scanning is a good time to organize things in a way that will work well for those who look at the photos in the future. Choose to scan just the few best photos from a particular event. Descriptive file names and keeping the same simple groups used for the physical collection make it easier to cross-reference. If you choose to post on a cloud, check with your parents on what permissions to allow. If you are posting recent photos, check with everyone else captured in them (including the parents of minor children) to make sure they're okay with sharing.
Something else your parents might appreciate about digitizing photos: they're searchable. You can search by file names and also by the content of the images. One way I've done this is to search for "cat," and it finds all of my photos with cats in them.
Today's photos
Whether you've noticed or not, you are probably the new collector of photos in your family. It tends to fall on the people in the season of life involving weddings, new babies, and first days of school. If you don't have photos of your parents from the past few years, start taking them now. My family is in the habit of snapping a group selfie every time we sit down for a meal. I've also hired a professional photographer for graduation and holiday photos, and got a couple of posed photos of my parents alone. They participated reluctantly, and that's good enough for me.
While you're taking new photos now, think about how to preserve them. I printed an annual photo album with brief descriptions and gave it to the grandparents and my spouse as a Christmas gift each year. The digital files are also worth saving in a mix of formats, including flash drives and Google drive. Beware the risk of saving everything (and not renaming it!). A few great photos are better than lots of mediocre ones.
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Next step
Choose one photo collection to review.