As a long time film photographer in both the pre-digital and digital camera eras I eventually came to understood that having a reliable end-to-end developing|scanning|printing workflow was key to my enjoyment of photography. It sounds like boring monotony to put it that way but the fact of the matter is that when shooting pictures and being able to share and enjoy them by yourself or with others is an arduous chore it makes photography tedious to me.

I’ve been developing my film at home for maybe 25 years now and I had easy access to darkrooms for several years before that. At times I’d convert our kitchen into a film processing space for the evening. When we moved houses I graduated to a covered outdoor space with a utility sink (fancy) and now to an indoor space in the basement with a bigger sink. I’d set those spaces up so I could develop film without too much hassle whenever I needed to, and I did it pretty frequently.

A space for an enlarger wasn’t really in the cards and I was never a great printer so I would either get prints made at a lab or send them to a printing service. Eventually I started experimenting with scanners. I didn’t really put too much thought into scanning though, I never really cared about it. I had to set up my scanner, which I had a few of over the years, every time I wanted to use it, I had a ton of random giant TIFF files strewn about a poorly named directly structure on my computer. Once I’d printed or posted them on whatever service or site I was using at the time the scans were essentially forgotten about.

This was exacerbated by the fact that I had put together a photoblog style website which I used to encourage myself to shoot, develop, and scan pictures frequently which only made the problem worse. Or maybe it made it better, it definitely highlighted the magnitude of it to me. More on that project here

I had also tried a bunch of different image management tools over the years: Picasa, Aperture, DigiKam, iPhoto and also Google Photos, Dropbox, Flickr, SmugMug etc etc etc. Nothing really stuck and they all tended to just smear the mess out even further; each adding their own bit of technical debt with short live exif updates or weird file size and format changes.

At some point I picked up an early version of Lightroom and just dumped everything into it without bothering to figure out how to use it. At least it was in once place and was almost searchable.

The other side of this problem was managing my actual negatives. I was really good about using plastic sheet files (PrintFile pages) but I used a bunch of different film formats and would buy whatever print file (or equivalent) sizes were available at whatever store I was in whenever I needed them so I had about a thousand rolls of film in probably 20 different types of sheets stacked up in folders, or folded into shoeboxes. The negatives were all safe but the written data on the sheets was haphazard at best so finding anything was a fool’s errand. By the time the late 2010s rolled around this was causing me not to enjoy photography since every time I took pictures I was just adding to the mess.

I had a digital camera at that time also. Using it didn’t cause me to accumulate more negatives of course but I found sitting at the computer editing images very tedious. I realized that the only way to fix any of this was to bite the bullet and spend a bunch of time fix it all: fixing the way I developed film, fixing the way I organized and stored my negatives, fixing the way I scanned those negatives, and fixing the way I managed my digital assets (film scans + digital pictures).

Mostly though I knew that if I could make each piece of this puzzle quick and easy I wouldn’t have to refer to my photography as a “workflow” my photographs as “digital assets” all the time. And when a friend wanted a copy of “that picture we took when we were camping a few years ago” or “that one you took of that thing 10 years ago” I’d be able to find it in less than a year. Maybe I could start to enjoy photography again, which is all I really wanted to do.