brian wrote:
Hello all

I have a project to try and organize a chest of photos, negatives and slides
that I have accumulated over that last 30 years.
Currently I have a large chest that holds all the materials. There are
mainly 35MM colour negatives and prints. The negatives and prints are mainly
in the photo shops packing envelopes. Some of the choice photo prints have
been put into albums
I also have some 35 mm slides,black and white 35MM negatives and prints , I
also dabbled in the APS system for a short time and have about a dozen or so
packets. And a few dozen large 120 type negatives from my parents from the
1940's era.

My original thoughts are to get a few surplus filing cabinets to hold the
materials in manila folders but it sounds like that may not be a good idea
as most articles I've read some articles that suggest 3 ring binders and
special acid free materials.
I've also been looking for some sort of computer database software to index
everything and only found reference to one specific program for this purpose
called Camera Collector but it sounds like it may be more oriented towards
camera hardware not prints and negatives.

Any suggestions on a numbering scheme. Do I worry about filing things
chronologically. I'm thinking that a good index would make this unnecessary.
Any suggestions from some one who have been down this road would be
appreciated.

I am assuming that you goal is to have a system where you can with out
too much effort find any given photo.

What I find is that one set of negatives and the prints that go along
with them have some common element, the same vacation, wedding family
get together etc. I find that if I see just one of the photos from
this group I will pretty much know what is in the rest of the group.
Also if there is one particular photo I am looking for seeing one photo
from the group will be enough to tell if it is in that group or not.

So what I have done it to make what I call key photos, the photo that
is more representative of the group is scanned and named with it group
number. Sometimes for a set of negatives it might take two key photos.
These scans should be fairly low in resolution, I use 1280 x 1024, this
speeds up browsing through them later. If you put all your key photos
into one directory you will not have on photo for every 24-36 photos to
scan through, depending on the size roll of film you shoot. So lets
say you have 400 rolls of film, this would be 400 keep photos to look
through, a good browser like ACDC makes this very fast, I can view
about 4 photographs a second.

Note this key photos do not have to be very high quality and scanning a
print on a flat bed scanner would work well. I scan all the negatives
on the roll so when I want to find a given photo I can go right to the
photo on the computer, if I wish.

The photos and negatives then simply have to be organized in such a way
that you can find the given group, this can be as simple as by number.

I so the same thing with my digital photo but here I pick out a key
photo from everyday, some days require 2 or 3 photos depending on what
all I was photographing that day.

Note the key photos could also be printed out as thumbnails so if
someone wanted to search using paper instead of the computer they
could.

I find looking for photos in this way to be far faster then reading
descriptions on what the photos are of.

This may not work for everyone but this is what I find works well for
me.

Scott