How do you organize and archive your photos?

[durdeni]

Hello,

How do you organize your scans, processed pictures, digital pictures, negatives, slides... ? I'm looking for inspiration to find the best solution for me to manage my still growing archive. Thanks for sharing your ideas.

kind regards,
Durdeni

 

[ClaremontPhoto]

Negatives and CD in an envelope with the date. There's a special pen to write on the CD.

CD uploaded to iPhoto.

Usually no more than one film per day so no duplicate date references, but if I do do more than one I suffix with A, B, C etc.

 

[manfromh]

My negatives are kept in negative sleeves (paper) in a binder. Unfortunately I dont have many prints. The few ones I have are loosely in a drawer. Scans are in organized by the date of scanning, or by the film which was scanned.

 

[oscroft]

Negs and slides are in Clearfile pages and folders, with each film numbered (I use a small sticky label per film stuck at the margin of the page for negs, and labels on individual slide mounts for slides numbered 1/001, 1/002 etc). Film numbers go 1, 2, etc for slides (cos I started with those first), B1, B2 etc for b&w, N1, N2 etc for colour neg.

Every film is scanned (kept on HD with backups on external HD - I don't keep CDs or DVDs), and filed according to the following folder hierarchy...

Photos/Black&White/2007/B350/B350_001.jpg
Photos/Colour Negative/...
Photos/Transparencies/...

Digital photos (I have very few - just record shots) are filed something like...

Photos/Digital/2007/2007_05 Tarantulas/whatever.jpg

 

[pvdhaar]

Negs are kept in pergamine (acid and chlorine free) sleeves.

Pictures end up in an album, shoebox or trash bin. Or, on very rare occasions, are enlarged to A3 size and framed.

 

[durdeni]

Thanks Guys for your replies.

Claremont, keeping photos on CD/DVD could be dangerous. CDs have quite short lifetime. There are some CD/DVD disks for professional use with much more longer lifetime but as far as I know, HDD drives are the best for this purposes.

d.

 

[Bike Tourist]

I used to shoot only transparencies. I had my own system of alpha numeric codes which worked well for my 40,000 slides. I could always find whatever I needed.

When digital came along, I used my same system, only filed on CDs or later, DVDs. I have been doing this for a long time with no lost files yet.

To continue shooting film I was forced (just about) to use negatives. These are harder for me to classify and retrieve, since I just file them in sleeves and date each sleeve but I can't distribute them to categories easily.

These days I'm not too serious about preserving my "legacy" so if all the images are lost it's no big deal. There are quite a few images being created every day.