One of
the biggest problems with slides and traditional film is keeping
track of what you have. Negatives are even worse as you cannot tell
what you have at a glance. Even if you have a filing system with
thumbnails and a way to search, locating that perfect negative you shot
10 years ago could be a real issue. Luckily computers can make your
life easier, even for the film photographer. All you need to start is a
binder, film protector pages, and Picasa. Picasa is a free program you
can download with the links at the top and bottom of this page.
Start by separating all of your slides out by format and assigning a
number to each format. I use 1 for 6x7, 2 for 4x5, and 3 for 135. What
you are doing is building a filing hierarchy. Under this system you
know any 6x7 will start with the file name "1". The next
number is a sequential number for each page of the format.
For example
page two of 6x7s would be 1-2. One indicates the format while two
indicates the page number. The final number is the location on the
page. So 1-2-5.jpg would be the 5th slide on page two of 6x7s. In this
example you can see the format and page lighlighted on the left side of
the page with numbers superimposed indicating page position. Depending
on the number of slides you have to file, you may want to go one page
at
a time.
Once you
have a full page you can generate your thumbnails. You
do not need anything high resolution here. I suggest putting the entire
page on a lightboard and snapping a quick digital picture. When you
save your thumbnails use the same hierarchy you used on the physical
slides. The images above should give you a better idea on how the file
structure should look.
With the
images uploaded into the same album in Picasa, you can begin
adding descriptions. Use something that is easy to remember and
describes your picture. Items in the picture and even colors under
descriptions can be helpful years later when you cannot quite remember
what you called something.
This is the part where all of the work pays off. Now that you have all
the slides indexed and your thumbnails generated, you can quickly
scroll
through your images to locate the one you want. What is even nicer
is that you can search the images descriptions. So if you know you want
a
picture of a beach, but you cannot remember what beach it was, you
simply type in "Beach". Picasa will return all the images you tagged
with the keyword beach. In my example I was looking for the image of
the Corona bottle. At a glance I now know it is on page two of 6x7s at
the end of the first row, and if I want it, there is also a negative of
the
image on page one of my 35mms.
At first this process can seem overwhelming. But after a few pages you
should be able to do 100+ images per hour. This little bit of time now,
could save you countless hours and frustration later.
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