Before you do that, I would like to point out I donated the entire TNG collection, and later found out it could have been sold for over a thousand.

VHS is low resolution and degrades over time, no reason to keep it unless you have tapes of things that don’t exist on better formats.

No.

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So they’re slowly rotting (I mean, not rotting but you know what I mean). It’d be wise to back them up digitally if better digital copies are hard to come by.

But a couple additional thoughts:

1. Whenever you actually watch one of them, put it back on the shelf backwards/upside-down. Wait up to six months. Anything on the shelf that isn’t backwards/upside-down gets put in the ‘don’t keep’ pile.

2. If you’re looking for a hobby, don’t want to keep them but don’t want to toss them right away, you could play around with … idk exactly you call it, but video mixing? A couple VCRs, some sketchy looking hobbyist tech from Etsy, and a capture card, and you can play around with multiple analogue video sources and noise introduction to make some cool as fuck visuals. Actually looks hella fun, it’s high on my post-divorce distraction list. Use 'em till they’re dust for this purpose or you get bored. If you want to squeeze more life out of them afterwards, there’s lots of crafts you can do with old VHS bodies and tape.

Caveat: At minimum, if you have old VCR recordings, back that shit up ASAP. Old commercials and TV shows (particularly super local stuff) are of massive interest to a certain type of person, who would appreciate your efforts. This goes double for cam footage/recordings of live events.

if you have a VHS player buy a cheap digital VHS to USB converter. You can get them for like 15-20$ and they plug one end into composite cable and the other end into the USB port of a laptop, then you can digitize the tape.

You should probally do that sooner rather than later though, those tapes don’t last forever and eventually they will degrade.

I think you should keep physical media. I once bought a digital copy of a pretty obscure record from Google Play Music when you could still buy records from them, and eventually it changed to YouTube Music, and the record just vanished from my collection despite me having bought and paid for it. I’ve heard of other stories like this too. The companies just decide not to offer it anymore and it’s gone.

My response is likely to be unpopular but it’s how I feel. I had ungodly gobs of physical media years ago - VHS, DVDs, BlueRay, CDs, etc. It got to where it was more of a hassle to dig through and find the item then slub it over to the equipment just to enjoy my media.

I digitized everything and stuck it on a home media server. Now it’s as simple as grabbing the remote and pick what I want and it’s done. I’m much happier now.

Keep only the good or rare ones.

Contrary to to what you think, not everything is available digitally.

There’s a lot of movies that are only on VHS (they never made it to DVD or streaming) and they can be worth some money. Might want to check them on eBay and see the values.

I have a small collection, would love to have a mini video rental store setup with VHS and DVDs to pick movies to watch and have a popcorn machine and neon lights.

I think in a while they will turn into collector’s items

Donate if possible.

We donated ours to a local nonprofit org that rents them out. Such a cool group of film nerds running this operation. https://www.weluvvideo.org/

Don’t. Physical media is 1000 times better than streaming.

Do you even have a working VHS player? The rubber pinch rollers degrade after a few years.