What archiving systems d you guys use..
Archiving, well....
Snce I started back with film, I've only a few packets, from various different processors, all different sizes, some with CDs, some not. I'm not at all sure what to do with them.
Last year I found the box of slides and negatives (just a basic cardboard box) in our garage near the door (so, I guess subject to temperature ranges of -5 to +30 Celsius). That's where it had sat since we got back from Australia 15 years ago; in Adelaide it had been in a cupboard in our un-air-conditioned house. I guess the temperatures inside the house rarely got much above 35 Celsius, regardless of what happened outside, but we had an evaporative cooler, so the humidity was often sky high (basically the cooler pumps air in through wet straw; works a treat in a dry climate like Adelaide, no good for Sydney etc). What I'm trying to say is, these slides and negatives were pretty mis-treated.
When I started scanning (I've done a few thousand negs and slides so far) I found most were in pretty good condition, considering. A very small number of films were in fairly bad condition, mainly a few Kodak Plus-X films from 1973 showing irregular white lines, almost as if the emulsion had shrunk a bit. Of course there were also scratches and dust, particularly on the slides, and also marks on a fair number of negatives from poor quality sleeves (you could usually tell when this was going to happen, from problems getting the negs out of the sleeves).
So yes, take good advice from the people here who know much better than me. But no, don't worry too much; my experience is that film is pretty robust even when
severely mis-treated.
Prints generally came off worse, and particularly suffer from lack of any metadata at all, no real clue what goes where, what sequence etc. This is particularly true if we liked them, as they got handled more! Non-Kodak slides (un-numbered plastic mounts fallung apart) were also a problem.
There'll probably be a collective sucking in of breath at this post! :shrug:
