I was pretty excited that there was what appeared to be a viable 120 film carrier coming my way but this is the meant that I was going to need to figure out a bunch things that I was dreading.

Before I could start scanning I knew I needed to develop a workflow. To do that I’d need to collect and organize all of my negatives, and I’d need a way to keep track of them over the course of a few months of scanning, and I’d need a play to store them when scanning was complete.

This developed over the course of maybe a month or so. The first thing I did was start finding everything. I had most of them stored in my closet but every once in a while I’d open a storage bin in the garage and find 10 more sheets, or a box of prints that had a couple of rolls worth of negatives in it etc… Over the course of about a month of finding a few more here and there I had everything.

I picked out some nice archival binders that would be perfect for long term storage and bought enough of them that I’d be able to fit everything comfortably
Sorted every sheet of negatives by date (roughly, sometimes I didn’t know the date)
Further divided into different film formats and then within each format I divided into color / black & white.

This was all so I would be able to have a straight-forward way to scan. Its very time consuming to scan a roll of 35mm, the switch to 6×6, then back to 35mm, then 6×7 etc. The same thing holds true for the processing work on the computer, I didn’t want to convert black and white, and then some color, and then some more black and white.

This was all about setting up an efficient worklfow so I could put some music on and zone out for an hour or so in the evenings.

In the end I had a bunch of stacks of negatives all over my office room for about a week while I sorted through this stuff and revisited it a few times.

I also replaced all of the odd negative sheets I’d used over the years with the PrintFile ones I standardized on and transferred all of the written notes between them. I probably had to replace about 10% of the sheets.eets.