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thewayneI had this three-ringed binder of negatives dating back to the 1970s! Black & white and color negatives that I'd taken over four decades of photography, 50-60 pages of them. The problem was, they weren't logically organized - it wasn't one roll per page, as they should have been, they were horribly mixed up and one page of negatives could contain negatives from 3-4 rolls! And it's not always easy to look at a strip of negatives and say what they are.
The only solution was to scan them all and sort them out later. Sort of the 'Kill them all and God will know his own' solution.
Slides are easy to scan if they're already mounted in holders, and because they're positive images, you can look at them by holding them in front of a uniform light and tell what they are. Negatives, not so much. To definitively see what a negative contains, you have to scan them. They have to be put in a scanning tray, then a top part has to be put in place VERY carefully because when you latch it, the strip of negatives might shift, and you have to start over. It can be very frustrating.
I started this project to scan them all in 2014 and it took several weeks to complete the scanning portion. I think I was lucky to do more than 3 pages of negatives a day, but I was frequently limited to 2-3 hours daily, lab hours depended on what classes they were running and what else I was doing. This was the same Nikon scanner that I was using last month to scan slides, it just used a different tray to mount the media in.
Eventually the work was done, and I ended up with a folder on my iMac that contained over 50 folders beneath it, one for each page in my binder, and held over 80 GIG of files! One file, usually a DNG (Digital Negative) for each frame.
Last night I FINALLY organized them!
It's one of those tasks that you just put off forever, and finally I started it a couple of nights ago. I opened up Bridge, an Adobe program that comes with Photoshop that, among other things, lets you view entire directories of photos. It does lots of stuff that are useful to photographers, it's not just a file browser. I was able to delete a bunch of files that were clearly bad files: negatives that weren't exposed or were camera mis-fires, things like that. I wasn't grading them editorially yet. It also set my brain percolating on how to organize them properly.
Last night my plan came to fruition. With Bridge open and slightly shrunk, I opened two Finder windows (like Windows Explorer) so I could see the file names. All of the sub-folders started with S or U and were followed with numbers or a descriptor, so I created a few standard folders for organizing things, like a_Landscape, a_WhiteSands, etc. Then I'd open a folder in Bridge so that I could see everything, open the same folder in my left Finder window, then drag the files as appropriate into the correct folder in the right Finder window.
It's wonderful to have a 27" 5K monitor!
Worked pretty well! Now everything is nicely organized, I don't really care that the 'roll information' isn't correct because I'm never going to refer to the negatives again, so that's immaterial. For example, around 1990, I don't know exactly what year or when, I took a couple of trips with some friends/co-workers to San Diego and Santa Fe. Those negatives were intermixed with other stuff across three or four pages! Now they're properly grouped together into two folders, 1990 San Diego and 1990 Santa Fe. The year is close enough and now I can find all of them easily, and that's the important thing. I have specific plans for those and that's to clean them up a little bit and send them to the friends in question as they might appreciate the photos.
The only solution was to scan them all and sort them out later. Sort of the 'Kill them all and God will know his own' solution.
Slides are easy to scan if they're already mounted in holders, and because they're positive images, you can look at them by holding them in front of a uniform light and tell what they are. Negatives, not so much. To definitively see what a negative contains, you have to scan them. They have to be put in a scanning tray, then a top part has to be put in place VERY carefully because when you latch it, the strip of negatives might shift, and you have to start over. It can be very frustrating.
I started this project to scan them all in 2014 and it took several weeks to complete the scanning portion. I think I was lucky to do more than 3 pages of negatives a day, but I was frequently limited to 2-3 hours daily, lab hours depended on what classes they were running and what else I was doing. This was the same Nikon scanner that I was using last month to scan slides, it just used a different tray to mount the media in.
Eventually the work was done, and I ended up with a folder on my iMac that contained over 50 folders beneath it, one for each page in my binder, and held over 80 GIG of files! One file, usually a DNG (Digital Negative) for each frame.
Last night I FINALLY organized them!
It's one of those tasks that you just put off forever, and finally I started it a couple of nights ago. I opened up Bridge, an Adobe program that comes with Photoshop that, among other things, lets you view entire directories of photos. It does lots of stuff that are useful to photographers, it's not just a file browser. I was able to delete a bunch of files that were clearly bad files: negatives that weren't exposed or were camera mis-fires, things like that. I wasn't grading them editorially yet. It also set my brain percolating on how to organize them properly.
Last night my plan came to fruition. With Bridge open and slightly shrunk, I opened two Finder windows (like Windows Explorer) so I could see the file names. All of the sub-folders started with S or U and were followed with numbers or a descriptor, so I created a few standard folders for organizing things, like a_Landscape, a_WhiteSands, etc. Then I'd open a folder in Bridge so that I could see everything, open the same folder in my left Finder window, then drag the files as appropriate into the correct folder in the right Finder window.
It's wonderful to have a 27" 5K monitor!
Worked pretty well! Now everything is nicely organized, I don't really care that the 'roll information' isn't correct because I'm never going to refer to the negatives again, so that's immaterial. For example, around 1990, I don't know exactly what year or when, I took a couple of trips with some friends/co-workers to San Diego and Santa Fe. Those negatives were intermixed with other stuff across three or four pages! Now they're properly grouped together into two folders, 1990 San Diego and 1990 Santa Fe. The year is close enough and now I can find all of them easily, and that's the important thing. I have specific plans for those and that's to clean them up a little bit and send them to the friends in question as they might appreciate the photos.
