Archiving 35mm negatives

As my pile of negatives keeps becoming bigger and bigger, need for good archival is something I'm waking up to. I do know I ought to archive everything in acid free binders/boxes, but there's one even more urgent question I have as most of my negatives were processed in labs: in order to put my negs in some ring binders, do I have to (or should I?) remove them from the sleeves they are now in or are there larger ring binder pages available in which I could slide these existing sleeves to without taking negatives out first? Replacing all existing sleeves with ring binder page archival sleeves would be rather big project, not to mention the greater risk of scratching my negs...

The sticking point is that you do not know if the negatives were archivally processed. You will need to test each roll of BW film to look for residual silver and thiosulfates. Color negatives are usually OK as they require less washing and are stabilized.

The sleeves from the lab are NOT archival.

chip j said:

The sleeves from the lab are NOT archival.

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Thanks. I guess I better prepare for a bigger archiving project then.

kuparikettu said:

Thanks. I guess I better prepare for a bigger archiving project then.

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Perhaps it depends on how you define "archival". If you want every negative to last for 100+ years, you need to consider the negatives themselves and their processing. B&W can be tested for residual hypo products, etc., but the life of color negs is more debatable, even when properly processed. And you then have the concern of choosing truly archival storage products and their cost.

If you're more pragmatic, do you really need your negs to last that long ? I'm sure that a lot of my own negs and prints will finish in the trash when the time comes, but I'm realistic to believe it's that the pleasure which I have had in making them which really matters, not any great artistic or historical merit. So my storage is largely in the supplied sleeves, or similar cheaper general purpose sleeves if home processed.

OTOH, for the few sets which I hope might be of future value (historic places now demolised, steam locomotives long scrapped, that sort of subject), I have spent the necessary $ to buy quality storage (which I certainly couldn't afford if I tried to archivally save every shot I've ever taken, good or bad).

In the end I decided to ask my lab about those sleeves and they further inquired their supplier: they are made from PE and there is no need to replace sleeves with archival sleeves. Of course if there are strict archival standards to hold to then it might be a different case but for my home needs that information is enough. Now I only need to store these sleeves.

RE color negatives: I seem to recall reading back in the 70s that Kodak said that color negatives would show significant color shifts in as little as SEVEN years. I would hope that they are more stable these days.... Those of us of a certain age remember the ghostly color prints of the '50s and '60s. I was able to scan and massage a badly faded color print from the early 80's, but I haven't tried the real antiques.

I'm in the process of scanning into Lightroom hundreds, thousands of my negatives and slides. The originals are placed in archival notebook pages, and Lightroom furnishes a really good indexing/cataloging system, in addition to "contact" sheets. I also need work on my Father's negatives and slides, some going back into the early 30's......