Archives

It is now nearly ten years since I stopped shooting film. My archive of digital images has been sorted and is now stored on multiple hard drives in different locations.  I described the process Here. 


What this has left me with is my archive of film and prints. These are the commissioned images I shot for my business over twenty years, images taken for 'stock library' submission, and personal family shots. In addition I have become by default the family archivist so I have images from both sides of my family and my wife's family going back over 100 years  As a very rough estimate I have between 400,000 and 500,000 images. There are B&W negatives, colour negatives and colour transparencies. There are also prints. Lots of the prints are from negatives that I still have, but many are images I made for companies that I worked for in the past, or are part of the family archive and so are unique. 
There is also great mix of formats. I mainly shot 35mm, 6x6 cm and 5"x4" but mixed in are panoramic shots, Half plate, 6x4.5, 6x7 and 6x9 on roll film, 10"x8", 110, 126, APS also polaroid images, a roll of cine film and some video.


The storage of all these images has become a major problem, They are stored in folders and many archive boxes, plus I have an edited set of transparencies in suspension files in three filing cabinet drawers. 


I have started to edit down what I keep. The easy boxes were the 'overs' from shoots. A set was delivered to the client and in most cases a negative also exists. Two archive boxes were reduced to one 10"x8" paper box everything else was shredded. The next step will be to start on the boxes of personal images and although most are 'seconds' it is still hard to destroy them.


I guess I now know what I am doing this winter.

Data, Data and more Data

For the past ten days I have been involved in a important,but very tedious task.
I started shooting digital in 2001 exactly ten years ago. At the beginning I used CDs to archive all my images. This was the most cost effective method as hard disks were small and expensive.
Cost of HD Via BoingBoing
For extra protection I wrote two discs. One was kept in my studio and one was stored off site (sounds better than in the shed!). This was OK as files were relatively small at around 4MB each.
In 2004 I changed camera and computer. Now most files were about 13MB and my computer could write DVD's. By early 2011 my archive had grown to 9 PhotoCDs 329 CDs and 220 DVDs  plus 6 internal and external HD's, where I stored files I needed on a regular basis.

The net result was rather chaotic, so rationalisation was needed.
The first thing was to purchase two 2TB drives and enclosures. Each disc would have enough space to store everything I had and the second disc was used as a mirror of the first. Then came the tedious bit, reading every CD and DVD back onto the computer crosschecking the files were on the Hard Drives  and recreating folders so I can find everything, then write these files back to the two 2TB drives.

This is now done The files need to be assessed and edited as a large proportion of clients from ten years ago are no longer in existence.
It has been lots of work. I also found that my early archive methods were not very efficient as several sets of files were archived in several places and some jobs seem never to have been saved at all, and a couple of discs had corrupted files.. The best thing for me is that I now have easy access to everything I have ever shot, I have space on the Hard Drives for another year or two of shooting and then I will be able to buy 4TB discs for the same price as the 2TB cost when I bought them. I also no longer have to worry about the long term stability of the DVD and CD discs I am free of the cost in time and money of creating DVDs and I space again when I get rid of the discs.