Over the next several posts I’ll share some of what I’ve learned about camera scanning and digital asset management over the last couple of years. I did a scanning project in 2020 that covered all of my photography since 2000. It consisted of mostly 120 film with some 35mm and bit of large format: about 1000 rolls (and sheets) in total. This helped push me to figure out how to scan film in a more efficient way and to tighten up my image catalog management.
I didn’t think I’d be able to digitize all of my work over the last 20 years in any reasonable way and was pretty happy that I figured out how to accomplish it. Seeing how other people have done this helped me out immensely while I was planning my approach. Hopefully I’ve done things in a way that will be helpful to others who are trying to figure out the same thing. Doing all of this has helped me with my current photography projects, being able to quickly and easily scan a roll or 2 of film is a great way to continue to be able to enjoy film photography.
My bulk scanning projects aren’t necessarily complete yet either. At my parent’s house there is a ~1 meter tall stack of binders filled with 35mm negatives from childhood through college. Much of it is assignments I did for college newspapers or other freelance assignment work so I haven’t really considered scanning it yet, but I haven’t counted it out yet either.
Here an outline of what I’ll cover in these posts, with the caveat that I might change this a bit as I go through it:
- Digitizing Negatives (overview)
- Flatbed Scanning
- Switching to Camera Scanning
- Scanning Workflow
- Digitizing My Entire Film Archive
- Organizing Negatives for Scanning
- File Naming
- Film Archive vs. New Work
- Physical Negative Storage
- Digital Asset Management
- Tagging / Metadata
- Smart Collections
- Summary / Notes (What Would I Do Differently?)