My Dad was an amateur photographer, and never, to the best of my knowledge, had a system for organizing negatives. He worked chiefly in 2-1/4 X 3-1/4, and his negs were (and still are) in envelopes, un-numbered, undated. When I started photographing in the 60s I just numbered the rolls of 35mm film, starting with 001. Later I added dates by year, so 001 became 64-001. Add the frame numbers, and I can identify any frame. (This got a bit complicated in my impoverished youth when I bulk loaded cassettes from 100-foot rolls and frame numbers weren't always 1-36. And I think I recall some film stocks were numbered for half-frame. And then there are negs from a Rollei 35, which ran film upside down.) The system still works for all roll film formats. I keep proof sheets separate from the negs. Sheet film gets a different system; but date followed by sequential numbers work.
My system for digital files is essentially the same: 2-digit year followed by 2 digit month followed by 2-digit day, space, 4-digit exposure number starting with 1001. All digital images are cataloged and keyworded on ingestion in Lightroom, but if that ever dies, or Adobe goes bust, I can still retrieve images. The advantage of YYMMDD is that it's self-sorting. I like systems.
My negative sheets and files are absolute chaos, but there’s one thing that I do that gives me hope that one day I can sort it all out, and that is that absolutely everything is scanned and electronically filed in date order as soon as I have processed the negatives, a sort of digital contact sheet file that I can refer to very easily.
That was very insightful. Especially the drawings of your favourite frames. I haven’t seen anything like this before. Very interesting and inspiring!
Thank you Jakub.
My Dad was an amateur photographer, and never, to the best of my knowledge, had a system for organizing negatives. He worked chiefly in 2-1/4 X 3-1/4, and his negs were (and still are) in envelopes, un-numbered, undated. When I started photographing in the 60s I just numbered the rolls of 35mm film, starting with 001. Later I added dates by year, so 001 became 64-001. Add the frame numbers, and I can identify any frame. (This got a bit complicated in my impoverished youth when I bulk loaded cassettes from 100-foot rolls and frame numbers weren't always 1-36. And I think I recall some film stocks were numbered for half-frame. And then there are negs from a Rollei 35, which ran film upside down.) The system still works for all roll film formats. I keep proof sheets separate from the negs. Sheet film gets a different system; but date followed by sequential numbers work.
My system for digital files is essentially the same: 2-digit year followed by 2 digit month followed by 2-digit day, space, 4-digit exposure number starting with 1001. All digital images are cataloged and keyworded on ingestion in Lightroom, but if that ever dies, or Adobe goes bust, I can still retrieve images. The advantage of YYMMDD is that it's self-sorting. I like systems.
Heck! A fully numbered system AND keywords!
I consider my negatives organised if they are in the correct year folder. Mind you several years span two or three folders…..
My negative sheets and files are absolute chaos, but there’s one thing that I do that gives me hope that one day I can sort it all out, and that is that absolutely everything is scanned and electronically filed in date order as soon as I have processed the negatives, a sort of digital contact sheet file that I can refer to very easily.