The Classic Machinery Network

Hi all,
This is a bus ride off topic so apologies in advance.
We are currently in the unfortunate situation of the redistribution of a late relatives accumulated belongings and we are stumped as to what to do with photos.
He was single with no other family, but travelled the world and took masses of photos. Obviously there are some family pics to keep but is there any organization out there that could make good use of probably thousands of mostly untitled, undated pictures of, well, goodness knows what, where or when! Some have posed groups in, although a thumbnail guess would suggest most of the participants are also long gone.
There are hundreds if not thousands of prints and negatives, it feels wrong to throw them away or destroy them, but keeping them is out of the question by simple volume. We even have two rolls of undeveloped 35mm to process so that will be interesting.
He was a university lecturer so it would be nice if they went to an education or research facility but any suggestions will be explored.
Thanks.

Difficult one. Perhaps you could offer them to the university where he was a professor? Trouble is it takes space to store and time to sort.

essexpete wrote:Perhaps you could offer them to the university where he was a professor?

Seconded; definitely, the first place to try.

There are fantastic print quality scanners out there (I have been known to use one at work for scanning Radiographs) which can cope with both pages of a broadsheet newspaper, at staggering resolution, so several photographs can be scanned all at once, and of course negative scanners, so the archive can 'relatively' easily be digitised

TBH if there are no references for the photos they are not much good to anyone unless they are specialist subjects like aircraft, trains etc
Similar thing happened locally here with a very keen amateur photographer, there were no takers and they were binned.
Craig

Hadn't thought to offer them to the university. I have been in contact previously and they are taking the vast amount of subject books and reference paperwork, along with the research notes - in all about a van full! I'll have a chat with them.
Thanks.