I'm finishing work, retiring, downsizing house-wise and moving 300 miles. I have files of film negs going back from the mid 70s to just after the millenium. They are in large A4 binders and take up a deal of space in two large metal office roll door cupboards. I rebel internally to the thought of dumping them - weddings, families, commercial - you name it, a large proportion of my working life. Thousands of images and far too many to digitize. Once they are gone it's forever. There are probably some of my own family on film ends too. My Wife wants me to dump them - what to do.... any thoughts?
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What to do with 30 years of negatives?
- Thread starter philm5d
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This has been an ongoing project for years using everything from dedicated film scanners to flat beds. I currently still use a now ancient Canon flatbed which adapts up to 4 x 5 but is very very slow. If you can even find a working old dedicated scanner, with drivers, they're pretty slow too for the size of your collection.
You can pay a fortune to have a service scan them with no assurance about quality.
I think the fastest option, and possibly the highest quality to cost ratio, is to get an adapter for a digital SLR to reproduce slides or strips of film. There are lots of options for this but you will have to do a significant amount of post processing beyond batch conversion of negatives. If I were starting over that is what I would do.
Realistically your wife's attitude toward these things is likely the attitude your heirs will adopt anyway, such is life. But if it means something to you then go for it. Move the stuff now, toss the originals as you scan them but if you aren't ever going to scan them what is anyone else ever as in never going to do with them?
Every time I find an old photo or film original I scan it but more often than not the images seem to be at best of only passing interest to the people pictured in the image. It will be an interesting cultural phenomenon to see what the attitude of today's Instagram and Selfie obsessed culture is to the zillions of images being generated when there is a decade or two of perspective.
People who make backups of their backups for all their hoarded personal bits and bytes might be a tad delusional. Ask anyone who has had to sort through all the stuff left behind by a departed first degree relative.
You can pay a fortune to have a service scan them with no assurance about quality.
I think the fastest option, and possibly the highest quality to cost ratio, is to get an adapter for a digital SLR to reproduce slides or strips of film. There are lots of options for this but you will have to do a significant amount of post processing beyond batch conversion of negatives. If I were starting over that is what I would do.
Realistically your wife's attitude toward these things is likely the attitude your heirs will adopt anyway, such is life. But if it means something to you then go for it. Move the stuff now, toss the originals as you scan them but if you aren't ever going to scan them what is anyone else ever as in never going to do with them?
Every time I find an old photo or film original I scan it but more often than not the images seem to be at best of only passing interest to the people pictured in the image. It will be an interesting cultural phenomenon to see what the attitude of today's Instagram and Selfie obsessed culture is to the zillions of images being generated when there is a decade or two of perspective.
People who make backups of their backups for all their hoarded personal bits and bytes might be a tad delusional. Ask anyone who has had to sort through all the stuff left behind by a departed first degree relative.
How many negatives do you have ? I have about 14,000 and it didn't take very long to digitize them all with a mirrorless camera and a macro lens. You can copy about 400 in an evening.
What does take time is removing dust spots, but of course you need to do that only for a selection of the best images.
Are they colour or B&W negs ?
+++++++++++++++++
Can you squeeze more neg file pages into the folders ? Then they would take up less space.
Mainly colour, perhaps 15% black and white, a quick estimation, an average of 300 sheets per binder with 12 exposures on each x 25 binders, that's 90,000 images - sheesh.
No-one has asked about any of them for 20 years but the minute I toss them someone will be on the phone saying they've had their wedding album destroyed in a flood and is there any way to get copies....
Wallace Ross
Senior Member
My thoughts. Keep what you think matters to you downsizing to maybe one binder. Then offer the rest to a local historical society to go over if there are some that would be relevant. If it’s mostly studio shots then maybe it’s time to let them go.
Maybe scan enough to create a photo book that would be representative of your career for yourself. You owe nothing to anyone else if they haven’t come forward after all this time they aren’t likely to. People don’t even re- watch their wedding videos or open wedding albums.
Maybe scan enough to create a photo book that would be representative of your career for yourself. You owe nothing to anyone else if they haven’t come forward after all this time they aren’t likely to. People don’t even re- watch their wedding videos or open wedding albums.
Gone for Good
Senior Member
mamallama
Forum Pro
Basically you only want a way for yourself or someone to be able to quickly scan and locate pictures of interest at a particular time for a particular purpose. You really don't need to individually print all 90,000 images to do that. That would be unnecessary and a waste of time and effort.
When I used to return from vacation with 30 rolls of 36 exposure color negatives. There was no way I was going to print 1000 vacation pictures. What I did was to print 30 proof print sheets and used that to pick which pictures to print.
Following that approach in your case, I would just scan each page on a flatbed scanner and attach it with each associated sheet of negatives. And just stash the 25 binders away with the proof sheets and negative sheets. The proof sheets only need to be good enough to identify the negatives for search and retrieval purposes.
Neil-O
Leading Member
Many years ago we were forced into a serious downsizing which involved parting with a lot of possessions. In retrospect I think we got totally carried away - once you start de-cluttering it can be strangely addictive, I find. Anyhow, all my B&W negatives got caught up in this whirlwind but back then I though I had finished with the darkroom and of course it was pre digital, scanning technology didn't exist.
I do very much regret it on one level, but I sometimes wonder if my current interest in photography would be so great if I still had thousands of old negatives to play with.
An old aunt of mine used to drill this into me "Don't get nostalgia" she used to say "it's the worst of all diseases".
I do very much regret it on one level, but I sometimes wonder if my current interest in photography would be so great if I still had thousands of old negatives to play with.
An old aunt of mine used to drill this into me "Don't get nostalgia" she used to say "it's the worst of all diseases".
farmersteve
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Fortunately you are not like my wife's family. I literally have about 10 pictures of her from when she was growing up. They threw everything away when she became an adult. They are the least nostalgic people I have ever seen.
OTOH, I feel your pain. Fortunately, most of my fathers and my film had prints with it and that's what I'm scanning. The negatives aren't organized in any fashion, just thrown in a box over the decades. I can only the negatives that really mean something. Eventually, I will throw most of them out.
Here is what I would do. Get a decent light table and look through them. Make the hard decisions to throw away about 80% of them, keeping only the really special stuff. Someday I will burden my children with all of this stuff, but it will be organized and digitized by then and they can make the decisions to throw away it all or keep it.
OTOH, I feel your pain. Fortunately, most of my fathers and my film had prints with it and that's what I'm scanning. The negatives aren't organized in any fashion, just thrown in a box over the decades. I can only the negatives that really mean something. Eventually, I will throw most of them out.
Here is what I would do. Get a decent light table and look through them. Make the hard decisions to throw away about 80% of them, keeping only the really special stuff. Someday I will burden my children with all of this stuff, but it will be organized and digitized by then and they can make the decisions to throw away it all or keep it.
arthur01
Well-known member
I can relate to this. I am going through stuff as we speak. Not only my archives but deceased relatives also. A local portrait studio in my home town was recently offering people who lost everything in bushfires to contact them for back up free files of special things like weddings.They had also acquired all the negatives of a former top studio so that these could still be made available if needed.Maybe you could approach someone who has the time and energy to become your archivist.Cheers. Geoff from Adelaide South Australia.
Moggi1964
Forum Enthusiast
You could seek advice from HamishGill but I'm not sure you would like his solution:
Should/do you keep you negatives
Should/do you keep you negatives
farmersteve
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To each his own. Everyone's negative problem is not the same. I have 10s of thousands of family negatives plus my own from film I still shoot. Quite simply they take up a lot of room. Unless you are world renowned professional photographer, I suggest culling your collection of negatives, especially snapshots of those trips you took to the beach or Yellowstone park when you were young. I was going through my deceased father's negatives and just started throwing out old snapshots of anything that wasn't very aesthetically very good and those that have significant family value. Even then, I plan on scanning only a fraction of those and putting them in the cloud and local backups. My kids will just throw it all away someday so I don't want to have them make the decision.
mamallama
Forum Pro
Just because they represent photographic images does not mean they all have the same value. Culling and cataloging them as negatives make a lot of sense as negatives and slides are archival and easy to store. There is no need to digitize them all and put them away on some cloud or hard drive just because you can. Of course digitize those that you have some immediate or near term use for.
DrBormental
Forum Enthusiast
Just curious: how much would you pay to have them all scanned and what level of quality would you expect?
Overrank
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Given that it’s been seven months did you eventually get a solution ?
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They're in paid storage along with the furniture we couldn't fit in the (temporary) new place.
Moggi1964
Forum Enthusiast
I can't imagine trying to cull that many images but I sense just dumping would be too difficult. When we moved back from the USA to a much smaller house in England I had to cull my book collection before we left and that was tough and time consuming and nowhere near 30k.
Maybe a job for the winter months when there is less daylight for adding more negatives to your collection.
Good luck with the move.
Last year I opened one of my binders of wedding colour negs from the 1980's and I was astounded to see the amount of degredation in them all, ranging from very obvious colour shifts to fading almost into oblivion, The were all pro films, developed and printed at the time by pro labs.
A quick look through many other binders, some going into the turn of the millenium, all showed varying degrees of degredation so I decided to carry out the ultimate cull and destroy the whole lot without looking any further.
Family orientated stuff was always kept in separate binders and sadly most of those negs also had to suffer the same fate. Fortunately, prints from these at the time have survived in much better condition and will remain safely in dark storage for subsequent generations to make the ultimate decision simply because I can't - although I have have culled a lot of rubbish content ones.
I delighted to say however that my B&W negs have survived in almost excellent condition and a recent darkroom session showed they still print easily.
A quick look through many other binders, some going into the turn of the millenium, all showed varying degrees of degredation so I decided to carry out the ultimate cull and destroy the whole lot without looking any further.
Family orientated stuff was always kept in separate binders and sadly most of those negs also had to suffer the same fate. Fortunately, prints from these at the time have survived in much better condition and will remain safely in dark storage for subsequent generations to make the ultimate decision simply because I can't - although I have have culled a lot of rubbish content ones.
I delighted to say however that my B&W negs have survived in almost excellent condition and a recent darkroom session showed they still print easily.
pseudobreccia
Leading Member
Dump them!
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