Negatives are a pretty important part of photography. If you took picture prior to your digital, you have negatives. There is not much of a way around it. However, knowing how to properly organize and store negatives is something you might be doing for a long time to come. Without negatives you cannot reprint photographs, or even print any at all.
I have hundreds upon hundreds of those tiny little strips in my possession – not only mine, but some of my extended families too. Figuring out how to organize them and store them was simply a nightmare at first. However, once I did figure it out, and was able to get things safely stored, it became easy to keep up with it. With the new digital technology I do not have quite as many negatives a year as I used to have.
If you don’t already keep your negatives organized and safely stored it is definitely time to get to that. It will save you time in finding what you are looking for and more importantly it saves all of your precious memories.
There are dozens of ways to store negatives, but the two most common are here in this article. I am sharing these, because they are the ones that I personally use, as do most of the people I know.
Archival Negative Sleeves in Storage Box
I place my negatives in archival negative sleeves. I then fold and place them into a plastic storage box and organize them by year and month. I put a label that has the year the negatives are from and then I stack these on a shelf. It is super easy to find the year at a glance when standing in front of the shelf. It is also very easy to find the negatives I am looking for once I open the box because they are organized by month. I tend to write on the outside of the negative sleeves what is on those negatives to make even that part a bit easier.
Archival Negative Sleeves in Three Ring Binder
I have also stored my negatives archival negatives sleeves and placed them inside a three ring binder. To me that was the easiest way at the time. When I got a roll of film developed I slid the negatives into the sleeves which were all ready in the binder waiting. I still labeled them and I also used dividers for months. Each binder had a year printed on the outside of it.
It does not matter which method you use, as long as you keep them safe, dry and in an archival place. It is also smart to store your negatives somewhere other than where you store your photo albums or scrapbooks.
Recommended Articles:
Properly Handling a Photograph
How to Best Organize Your Negatives
How to Best Organize Digital Images
Why Are My Photographs Deteriorating?