For the old school: How the heck did you organize photos in the film days?

I was messing around with my LR and setting up my Collections and Collection Sets. Then I began thinking, before computers and amazing software like LR, how in the world did you guys organize and search for photos back in the days of film??? Just curious.

I keep my negatives in 3-ring binders in archival sleeves, and I keep prints in envelopes in boxes. There are various companies that make acid free, stable, archival materials for storing photos.

And in 2010 I also store my film stuff digitally. My best film shots I drum scan at high resolution and store them like any digital shot.

Organize? Who's organized?

Lots of file cabinets with archival sleeves for transparencies and negatives alphabetically by client and date shot. My personal stuff was in separate file cabinets arranged by subject matter. I kept very few prints.

I stored my negatives/trannies in ring binders.. I would number each individual negative then do a contact sheet which was stored with the negatives.. Each ring binder had the genre and the date to and from.. I started using different coloured ring binders for each genre..

yogestee wrote in post #9812651
I stored my negatives/trannies in ring binders.. I would number each individual negative then do a contact sheet which was stored with the negatives.

This is precisely what I would do, though the numbering of each frame was already done by Kodak.

Pretty easy to organize 24 pics at a time.

I think it would be alot easier then trying to organize digital. I'm thinking I need to buy a second external drive (a larger one) and transfer all my pics over to that, while organizing at the same time. My current drives are so cluttered it's hard to move things around.

SkipD wrote in post #9813070
This is precisely what I would do, though the numbering of each frame was already done by Kodak.

This works fine until you have more than one roll per shoot..

Binders and albums. I was not a pro, so I didn't have that many shots, only about a thousand or so.

I lost over 90% of my creative stuff in a small disaster one year. That's everything, photos, poetry, personal writings, original manuscripts of published stuff. Poof! Gone forever.

Digital is much better, with multiple-venue storage.

Razeus wrote in post #9811479
I was messing around with my LR and setting up my Collections and Collection Sets. Then I began thinking, before computers and amazing software like LR, how in the world did you guys organize and search for photos back in the days of film??? Just curious.

pretty much the same way i do now:

'keepers' in 3-ring type photo books sorted only by date and negs/contact sheets in a big box cataloged by date and subject.

SkipD wrote in post #9813070
This is precisely what I would do, though the numbering of each frame was already done by Kodak.

yogestee wrote in post #9814040
This works fine until you have more than one roll per shoot..

I seem to recall that one roll usually fit on an 8x10 contact sheet. Thus, there was one contact sheet per page of negatives in a 3-ring negative holder and - especially with the contact sheet done in the same order as the negative holder - it was easy to find a negative by visually scanning the contact sheets. The numbers on the negatives just confirmed which of several look-alike image negatives you had in the enlarger.

I sometimes had the job of searching through negatives for reprints, especially team and school photos. We would keep them all seperated by original order and by photographer, but had to go through them visually on a light table looking for the "green team" or however the customer had described the image. We learned to read inverted print and see inverted colors. This was the eighties, early nineties. If someone asked me today to go find the negative of the young girl in the sweater with the rows of hearts on the front, or the boy in the rugby shirt with the white collar, I might still scream all these years later.

shoe boxes...

LOL...

Lets just say Kodak was about to give me a signature model of the Ektagraphic Trays.

I have no idea how many I had in my "Chrome" hayday. I think I am down to only a few that I have not sent off to be scanned yet. Each tray comes with a card that you fill out to record what is in each slot. So the box was labeled by subject, or assignment, or date depending on what was the best fit. Then the card would define what slot to go to to retrieve the image.

Also as mentioned above, I had a lot of the 3 ring neg holders and 3 ring slide holders.

I put the subject matter on a recipe card along with a number on the corner for the envelope number. I then would put the envelope number and the negative number on the back of each print. A few years before we went digital the lab that I used started to number the back of each of them which was a time saver. I then attached the card onto the envelope that the negatives came in and they went into a filing cabinet that I had special dividers built into so that I could fit alot in each drawer. I have 3 4 drawer filing cabinets full of negatives. I did have most of these cataloged into a spreadsheet that let me search for subject keywords. If one stayed on top of it, it was a good system.

For my 120 chromes I kept them in a binder in sheets. For the 35mm slides I kept in a box specially designed for them. I numbered each one and had most of them cataloged into a spreadsheet.

Pre-digital I shot way more medium format than I did 35mm.