I am about to take on a project I've been putting off for years. I desperately need to re-organize my negatives. There was a time when I was incredibly diligent about keeping my negatives in an organized state of affairs. The moment I finished scanning a roll of film I would throw it in an archival preserver, label it with the location and the name of the model, date it, and tuck it away in a storage binder. At some point however I got lazy and just started making piles. Lots of piles. Big piles. Piles stacked much higher than they ought to be. Thankfully I still make it a point to put my negatives in protective sleeves, but really that is as far as it goes.
I can honestly say this was a huge mistake because now I am looking at the daunting task of labeling and organizing hundreds, if not thousands, of negatives into some kind of useable system. It is tempting to gather them all up and just shove them all into three ring binders but the problem with that is whenever I want to make a print of a specific negative, I'll have to flip through page after page of processed film looking for that one negative I want. It would seriously be like trying to identify a criminal through a random mug book. This is one of those moments I really wish I had a friend who was an expert at organizing. You know, like those people who show up at people's houses on that hoarders reality TV show or something.
One of hundreds of piles of negatives waiting to be organized.
So now I believe the goal is going to be devising some kind of numbering system that I can tag my digital scans with. That way when I want a specific negative, I can reference the number in the digital scan, and then find the negative right away. It is going to take me a few weeks to put this together but hopefully in the long run it will save me a lot of time.