This is my first silver recovery from film scraps and fixer - I'm quite proud of myself right now 
Film was cut in small pieces, dunked in paper developer, shaken for a few minutes, strained, washed and put in a heated NaOH solution to dissolve the gelatin. Then the silver particles were filtered out with a coffee filter, washed and dried. For the fixer I went with the steel wool method. The resulting powdered silver was again filtered out, washed and dried. I melted the powder with a propane torch. If I had flux the results would have been much better I guess. All is well though, as this is the first time I do this. I don't remember how much fixer I had, but I did pour it in a tray with a fan blowing over it for about two days in order to concentrate it. I tried boiling it, but it started changing color and smelling pretty bad. It was maybe about 2 liters if fixer or thereabouts before the evaporation. Probably 90% of the total yield came from the fixer.
Just thought I'd share...
Film was cut in small pieces, dunked in paper developer, shaken for a few minutes, strained, washed and put in a heated NaOH solution to dissolve the gelatin. Then the silver particles were filtered out with a coffee filter, washed and dried. For the fixer I went with the steel wool method. The resulting powdered silver was again filtered out, washed and dried. I melted the powder with a propane torch. If I had flux the results would have been much better I guess. All is well though, as this is the first time I do this. I don't remember how much fixer I had, but I did pour it in a tray with a fan blowing over it for about two days in order to concentrate it. I tried boiling it, but it started changing color and smelling pretty bad. It was maybe about 2 liters if fixer or thereabouts before the evaporation. Probably 90% of the total yield came from the fixer.
Just thought I'd share...
..Or try to make bronze with it by adding tin. THe economy of fiddling with metal refining or melting it down or processing it is always a way to lose money unless you have a giant smelting business. Heating copper to melting temps in an oxygen rich atmosphere creates copper oxide, and they always ended up with 1/3 to 1/2 lost copper. It was always better to sell the scrap materials and buy what you want. You have to calculate btu's, joules, time, etc. consumed when doing this sort of thing. I imagine dribbling silver from the photo process at home is a similar way to lose time and money as well. Someone is St Louis had a Craigslist add about buying old X-ray film to scrap the silver from, I suppose on a large scale that might work, but it sounds like a lot of work for a few bucks.