digital database to organize film-prints archive needed

Hello everyone,

An recomendation for a free app - for computer or phone- that can help me keeping tracks of the print's developing info, but also film's number, position on the film, and to be abble to insert a small photo of the print so, later I can find the print's box and the neg easy?

Thank you very much!

I do this with Aperture for Mac, which isn't free or even currently supported, but my basic technic should work with most of the common free digital photo organizers. The key point in this is file naming.

1) photograph or scan your print
2) include all useful information in the filename, most photo programs allow you to batch rename files. The system I use is Date (YYYYMM) + film + camera + lens + developer + time + index (negative number). An example filename would be " 201707 HP5 plus - Minolta XTsi - Minolta 50_1.8 - HC110 dil B 5 minutes - 05.TIFF" Since I store negatives in chronological order, I would just look at the date at the beginning of the filename to know where the negatives are located. It seems somewhat awkward, but, by using VueScan software, I can set up the scanning process to automatically created the filenames. You could include as much information in the filename as you want, just be careful to avoid illegal characters in filenames. I generally replace "/" with "_".

A spreadsheet like Excel is very flexible for tasks like this.

Thank you all for the ideas!

I use a database in Open Office - The underlying table can be updated as you want to add/remove columns. Then you can create entry forms and reports/views. I also use OO text document tools to design my printed darkroom notes and 3x5 field cards. Free and flexible.

There is a database programme for the Mac called Bento......very easy to build and add contact sheets/sample images. Works on Mac and iPad.

Sadly no longer supported but replaced by Filemaker ($$$$$).

I had an excellent Microsoft Access database called PhotoCat, originally it was Shareware but the author made if free, I'd made a number of improvements. It worked perfectly in the first 2 versions of Access them when Microsoft but then the company changed the version of Visual Basic and it couldn't be upgraded. I was able to extract all the tables as Spreadsheets but not the Queries and Reports, I started to re-write it in Libre/Open Office but early versions had issues with One to Many Relationships however they've been resolved.

Recently I found the original Relationship Table that I'd printed I guess over 20 years ago and that will make it very much easier to re-build in Libre/Open Base. It wasn't related to the later commercial PhotoCat product.

Ian