Now it may seem somewhat silly to write a page on how to correctly store your photos. How hard is buying a binder and some sleeves, and storing them in there? Not hard at all. The point of this article is to get you to do it now.

It doesn't matter if you are just starting out, get a binder and some sleeves today, and start putting your negs or slides in there right after you shoot them. Prints are for showing, negs are meant to be stored in a safe place. If you shoot for a year you'll end up with a shoebox overflowing with film and you won't have the time or patience to deal with it properly. Worse yet, you'll want to get a nice big print and won't be able to find the negative!

This article doesn't deal with digital since I haven't gotten into that in any meaningful way yet. All I can say is good luck to you! Truthfully this is probably the single biggest reason I shoot film still. I don't have the patience for all the tedious computer work and I dislike the fact that the pictures never really exist at any point.

How should I organize my photos?

I go chronologically. Simple. Just add to the back of the binder as you get them back from the lab. A mistake I made early on was to put each strip in after the previous regardless of roll. This gets confusing fast, so I wouldn't recommend having more than one roll on each sheet. A 24 roll usually fills one sheet, a 36 one and a half. Always start a new roll on a new page. If you get those handy index prints back from the lab, holepunch it and put it in front of the page that roll starts on. This makes your life way easier when trying to pick negs when getting reprints.

If you're collection starts getting rather large, you may want to start a numbering scheme. I started one just so I could have a meaningful way to keep track of my pictures, and if I pull them for reprints I know which binder they go back into. My personal favourite system is the one I use for my slides, of the format year.roll.photo. As I mentioned before I was kind of dumb with negatives and didn't keep the rolls seperate so it goes Nbinder.page.sleeve.photo. Sleeves are counted from the top, photo from the left. This is way more confusing and ends up feeling like playing a game of Battleship after a while. I recommend the first system, but if you come up with something more clever let me know.

Pretty much any sleeves sold at any reputable store will be archival plastic, so no worries in that department. Just look on the label. For negs I use PrintFile sleeves and for slides I use ClearFile Archival Plus sleeves. This is personal preference and of no real importance, I just like the plastic of these brands and they feel good to work with. They're more ductile, not that plastic that feels like it'll shatter when cold, and they hold the slides snugly in place. I'm paranoid that a slide will fall out as I'm carrying them to the store and fall down a sewer drain or something. As for binders I just get the cheapest ones at the local office supply store.

A note about slides: they take about four times as much space as neg film. This is due to the thickness of the mounts.

Where Should I Store My Binders?

After some looking around at various sources on the internet, I'd say in a place with low to average temperature and humidity. So don't put them in your furnace room or bathroom. You also want a place where they won't be exposed to direct sunlight, so don't put them on a bookshelf facing a window. If you live in a basement suite be sure to put them on a bookshelf a few feet off the floor in case the basement floods.

December 15, 2005