Film Negative Archiving Challenges

Now that I’ve found a relatively fast and relatively inexpensive way to create a digital archive of my trove of film negatives, I started pondering to use the upcoming winter to go through about 20 years of negatives. Now, 20 years of negatives sounds like a lot. I have four or five folders full of negatives, and by a rough estimate each folder contains about 50-60 rolls of 35mm film negatives. Meaning that I will be dealing with about 200-250 rolls of film of 36 exposures, meaning overall about 7,500 photos. By digital-age standards, this is nothing.

In my planning, it should take about three months to do that, if I work two or three nights a week on the digitization, after my day job. That alone is a bit daunting, as I find that I am working in front of a computer screen too long too often anyway and that I am missing out on family life, meeting friends etc.

The more worrying part is actually something else. I have tested the scanning methods and devices on some old medium format rolls of film and found parts of my past that I had pushed to very back of my memory. In some case it was the pure memories of often difficult times, in other cases I couldn’t really bring me to converting the scanned negatives to positives because they contained images of my then girlfriend, who I had broken up with ages ago. That breakup turned into a downward spiral that took me a while, actually a couple of years, to get out of.

So, in a way, that archiving will be some sort of a reckoning with my former self, too. With my good sides and my not-so-good ones. What I didn’t realize until after another round of scanning old negatives was just how exhausting that reckoning can be. It caused me sleepless nights of sorting through and often not finding memories associated with the pictures I had scanned during that session. In combination with some work-related stress, this felt so toxic that I started to play with the thought of abandoning the project altogether.

I have also noticed that scanning those negatives is physically exhausting, too. After scanning four rolls of 35mm film, I found that I had nothing left in me to push the files on the hard drive, let alone filing them properly in folders.

And while it may well turn into a tedious technical exercise, but I hope to unearth a couple of the photos that I had never really had a chance to print or share.

One other thing that I’ve been thinking about recently is why would I take on this task in the first place, beyond the mere fact that I now have the technical means to do it? Why do I have to take it on now and not put it off for another couple of years (for instance until after retirement)? These are questions I cannot answer yet.

And before I’ve even started the whole project, I still have no answers on how to resolve a number of questions relating to the archive. What folder structure, what data to add, file names, etc.? And how will I file the negatives once I’ve scanned them? I have already bought a couple of new folders as the old folders were not really fit for purpose anyway.

There is still a fair bit of prep work to be done as things stand, both technically, mentally and also physically.