Years and Years of Photographs - Film to Digital Project

After a week of scanning, we've digitized 500 B&W negatives, one color negative and 150 color slides. That leaves only 15, 349 to go.

The B&W negatives scan much faster than color. The film scanner will scan up to 6 negatives at a time, and after rotating, cropping and image adjustment, we're getting about 24 to 30 digitized negatives an hour.

The color slides are much slower. We're only getting about 5 slides scanned in an hour.

The one color negative was a test, which showed me that the color negatives will take the longest to digitize.

It looks like this project will keep me busy for a long, long time.

NOTE: If you have any kind of archive, be sure to document your collection. Record dates, descriptions and any pertinent information. I have so many negatives that can only be dated by identifying the event captured. That's fine for things like birthdays and concerts, but abstract imagery, such as Woodscape at Full Moon, has no visual date clue.

I do not remember when or where this was taken. (There's a faint whisper of college or Iowa City, but that is an eight year stretch.) There is a date on the slide mount - Oct. '79 -(right before I moved to New York City)- but this is a duplicate slide, so I still have no record of when the original was taken. Where is the original image the duplicate was made from?

Where's the negative for Max, Lee and Child? I've got an 8x10 print, but I'd love to find that negative to scan. I found the roll of negatives that picture was from, but the strip with images 23 to 28 is missing.

As I page through the negatives for remembered images, I find empty slots. I'm sure I took the good negative to the lab to make prints, and then never put them back. As I prospect through the image files, I hope to stumble upon the fabled mother-load of missing negatives and slides.