Film Scanning and Storage

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I bought a film scanner, this led to an all time massive effort to catalog and save the myriads of negatives shot over 4+ decades.  Little did I know what I was getting into.  After a few weeks of scanning each frame on the rolls of film I found, I realized what a dopey idea that was.  Fortunately I did NOT get very far before I sat back and thought about it.

The first thing I decided, was I had no desire to scan everything (you are laughing yet?).  The plan was simple.  Sleeve all the negatives and catalog them so I could find what I wanted in under 10 minutes!

So I dug out the boxes and folders (many) of negatives, most already sleeved and then devised a system to search for the desired images. 

• Each negative sleeve was given a sequential number
• These numbers were entered into an Excel file with the following information
  • Sleeve Number
  • Film format
  • Film Type
  • Short set of keywords

Here is a bit of the file for reference:

Format and description are pretty self explanatory.  For the film type (3rd column) I used the following codes:

• b    B&W Negative
• cp  Color Negative
• ct   Color transparency
• cm  Color Mounted Transparency

At this point I did a low resolution scan of the entire negative page, placing a sequence number sticker on the left edge of the sheet.  While the scans were not always the best, they were good enough to convey what was there and allow selection for higher resolution scanning.  Beauty of teh Excel, is I can do a key word search and get a list of all sheets that match the description.

Searching for Wupatki yields the following results:

From there all I need to do is select the desired sheet...

I found some nice stackable snap lid storage boxes that fit the negative sleeves perfectly.  Each box holds 100 to 150 sheets depending on the thickness.  At this point I have sleeved, cataloged and sheet scanned 747 pages of negatives.  A rough calculation of a combination of film types yielded around 13,400 individual frames give or take a couple of hundred.  I estimate I have another 5% of the total to find and catalog.  The finding, cataloging and such has taken months to complete with an estimate of 40 hours or more.

Final scans are made using one of two scanners that I have:

• Epson V850 Flatbed with a wet scanning adapter

• Plustek 8200i Film & Slide scanner

One of the advantages of owning 3D printers is you can make "things", specifically in this case film carriers for the Plustek scanner.  I made a film carrier for 110 film, which my Pentax 110 SLR uses.

I 3D resin printed the top and bottom parts of the 110 film carrier.  Jobo 110/16mm film reel and the assembled film carrier.  The fit of the two parts was snug and beautiful.