It used to be you could find a box of photos or keepsakes that you inherited to look back on how things were or when you were a kid. Now, most of that is stored on phones, and most parents probably don’t think to share or save them in a way to be passed down in the future.
My grandmother started throwing away photos of people she no longer recognized as dementia set in. No one was aware of this until it was way too late.
I don’t have many pictures from my childhood. My grandparents took a couple of videos, but I doubt those VHS tapes survive.
One part of my wife’s family lost basically everything in a tsunami. They managed to find two mostly-recognizable pictures, so even a box meant to be passed down isn’t going to survive disaster.
I have a box of photos to scan, but I’ve never managed to get the scanner settings dialed in to where things look right to me and aren’t gigantic files. I suppose it’s OK, though; my family line dies with me so there’s no one on to whom to pass them anyway.
I remember PhotoScan giving good results. It takes 5 photos for each photo (middle and the 4 corners) and mixes everything.
Not sure about the privacy aspect though, it’s Google after all.
Link: https://www.google.com/intl/en/photos/scan/
Apparently some people collect photos like that. They might even have some value to a museum.
They can show how people lived in the past.
If I do get them all digitized, I would be willing to send plenty of them off to museums if there is actual interest. I imagine there’s none here (Japan) for someone growing up in the rural great lakes area of the US, but someone somewhere might be interested.