Organizing Your Film Archive - My Approach
Hello friends! It has been a crazy busy month; I took a weekend trip to Pennsylvania (for my grandparents’ 80th birthdays, lots of fun!) and am currently house-sitting for a friend. I’ve not had a lot of time to think about what I want to talk about this month, but thankfully the topic that I delayed from February will work nicely: my experience keeping my film organized and archived. We film photographers are faced with a unique challenge compared to digital shooters: our photos are not inherently dated or sorted by anything, unlike digital photos that come equipped with metadata, like date and time, from the outset. Obviously, we don’t even have digital files to begin with, since we’re using a physical format. This calls for the film photographer to be extra organized as they shoot, keeping track of what rolls were shot where, having a good long-term storage system, and deciding how to store the photos digitally, if at all. For years I had part of this figured out, but it wasn’t until 2021 that, with new access to good-quality and fast scanners, that I digitized every piece of film I have ever shot. So, although I know my system may not be for everyone, I’d like to walk us through my archive in the hopes that it can help others think about how to go about organizing their own work. Let’s get into it!
Four photos from four formats; in my archive they are named 129-027, 005-051, 002.027, and 2022 006. This numbering system helps me keep track of all my photos across formats.
First off, let’s talk about keeping track of the rolls we’ve taken. When I shot my first four rolls of film ever, back in March and April 2018, I wasn’t keeping track of when or where I shot them. I didn’t start keeping track until the next roll, which I called #1 for some reason. Then, for about a year, I numbered rolls based off of which camera I shot with. So I had rolls 1-20 that I shot on the Canon Rebel 2000, and then I had rolls 1-60 or so that were from the Pentax. This wasn’t great, obviously, since I had multiple #1s as well as the first four rolls that were never numbered, but I did one thing right; I filed the negatives and slides in sleeves in binders, so they maintained their order even when the numbering was off. This made it easier to renumber them last year when I was scanning all of them, and now I have a simple system where the 35mm rolls go from 1-185 (currently), as well as a separate numbering for my film from The Boricua Dialogues, which is labelled PR-1 through 47. If I could go back and change it, I wouldn’t sort them separately, but I don’t want to renumber every roll from 89 onwards.
Two binder sheets with various rolls; on the 35mm page there is one strip from roll 168 and six strips from roll 169, and then two strips from rolls 19 and 20 on the 120 page.
The other thing that I have gotten better at is dating and describing each roll of film. As I mentioned, I didn’t write anything down for the first four rolls, and even all the rolls I shot that summer don’t have too many descriptions on them, just maybe the month and one place I photographed. I’ve gone back and added some information, but it isn’t as accurate as it could be. In the years since, I have learned to write more detailed descriptions, including each date and place seen on the roll. This helps me add location to the scans later if I want, and would allow me to determine what roll is what if I sent out many rolls to be processed at once. I have used Google Keep to keep these notes, and at this point I have three different lists, one for each format that I shoot (not counting instant film). I really should print out the notes and put them in my film binders, but for now, I have everything where I can see it and remember it.
The first four rolls I ever shot are on the left; they aren’t precise in their dates or locations, while the right has some of the most recent rolls I have shot, with more details that help me remember what I took and when.
The next area of organization is the digital scans, what I call the Full Film Archive. I had to decide how to sort everything in folders, and I chose probably the most obvious of methods: Film Format > Year > Roll. So, if I was looking for roll 171, which was a roll of 35mm from October 2021, I’d go to 35mm > 2021 > 171. Then, every photo in that folder is named after the frame number on the film, so I can easily go back and forth between the binder and computer if I need to reference the actual negative (for example, if I’m pulling it for new scans). One thing I had to think about was how to avoid film from different formats having the exact same filename, since there will be times, as I’m assembling books or other projects, where the same numbered photo could be used. I’ve avoided that in several ways. Both 35mm and 120 photos are labelled [roll number]-[frame number] (171-036), but for 120 I use the top frame number (41-55, what’s supposed to be used for 645 size film) so that, unless I shoot a roll of 35mm that has 41 shots on it, those numbers are never going to conflict. Then, for large format, I use a dot instead of a dash (002.013), and for Polaroids, the year and the number (2022 026), so that if for some reason all four formats got piled into one folder, they would maintain their integrity. One thing I could do, to help that structure remain solid, would be to add metadata (in Lightroom or another app) to these photos so that they inherently possess the date and location, but so far I haven’t found that necessary since I have the information in the lists.
This is what a roll of film looks like in the Full Film Archive. I’ve got everything numbered based off of the frame number, so the folder holds every image in order the way I want, and I can pull photos while knowing where the originals belong.
So that covers my film organization; I’m not sure why I expected it to take longer, but I think that’s honestly about it. The main think I take away from the last few years, relative to my archive, is that although I didn’t always sort my film correctly, or at least how I do now, I did myself a solid by keeping my film in chronological order and keeping track of when I shot it. Because of this, I was able to relabel my photos with ease, since the physical storage didn’t change. I’ve worked out how to best sort the digital archive as well, and it’s flexible enough that I could add more formats to it without a problem. I’m currently working on uploading all my photos to Google Photos and making a fully keyworded archive, but that isn’t essential to me at this point. And having this organized system allows me to maintain a cleaner workflow as I make prints or work on projects, since everything has its place within the archive, and is therefore able to be accessed quickly and precisely. I hope that this quick overview of my system for my film has been helpful, and as always feel free to hit me up to ask about any of it! I think that it’s critical to film photographers to have some way of organizing our work, and this is the way I do it. Thanks for reading!