Film processing confusion in need of being educated...

Old Gregg said:

One copy is on your PC. Three others are on a NAS box (network attached storage) like Synology or QNAP. Most of them have a "checkbox" to automatically encrypt & upload themselves to Amazon S3 cloud storage service which keeps 3 copies in 3 different locations. This is a zero-effort fully automatic option, yet it offers advanced capabilities like backup verification when the NAS checks if the data in the cloud is identical to the local copy. If that's not enough you can enable Amazon Glacier (cold storage - this is when your data is stored on replicated tapes in offline mode).

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Or the operating system gets changed and a decision [or lack of appropriate action] not to convert all those old files ==> who needs that old crap now. And poof it is all gone. NASA almost lost all the pre Moon landing photographs and data because all the computers and tape machines were being scrapped. No like it or not digital data is not yet archival. Film and negative are archival but not guaranteed to last forever either.

Sirius Glass said:

Or the operating system gets changed and a decision [or lack of appropriate action] not to convert all those old files ==> who needs that old crap now. And poof it is all gone. NASA almost lost all the pre Moon landing photographs and data because all the computers and tape machines were being scrapped. No like it or not digital data is not yet archival. Film and negative are archival but not guaranteed to last forever either.

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No, no no... The Cloud solves all mankind's data retention needs. It's infallible. It's a panacea. Old Gregg said so.

Gregg, no digital solution is perfect, and the sooner people realize that, the better. When a company like Apple can release an OS with a setuid 0 script, that uses an environment variable to determine if you're root, you realize that no one is perfect. And then you run across the exploit used by a particular spyware package that used a PDF that was actually a GIF that would use the image data to create a virtual CPU to run the malware-- and you realize that all bets are off, because before last month, I would have sworn such an attack isn't possible.

No physical copy is indestructible either, unless you consider something like the golden record on Voyager-- and that's not indestructible, it's just highly resistant to time.

Right now, the chances of someone accidentally deleting data they believe is on the cloud, is higher than the chances that my notebooks of printfile negative holders will be destroyed. But both are possible.

I think we are forming a consensus that physical backups at home are not a bad thing, and that cloud services can be part of, but not the sole, backup. My family does not have any history of a house fire destroying anything (not keeping negatives correctly, though, is another story).

Cloud services are vulnerable, though. Where I work used to host it's own Kronos server for payroll. We moved to the cloud services a number of years ago. Kronos got hit and the cloud-services are still down. Now our managers have to fill out and upload spread sheets, lol.
https://thestack.technology/kronos-outage-latest-ransomware-backups/

We use Onedrive at work, and I can't tell you how many times people lost data and come to my department (IT) to help. Sometimes it was user error, sometimes it was a network-based issue. Sometimes the backups are actually there, but the user has no clue on how to find them.
The point is, these are average people, not computer aficionados. The average user can more easily lose something computer-based than a physical object.

When we cleaned my grandmother's house after she died, I found shoeboxes of my grandfather's negatives. I'm glad I did not find a shoebox with a URI to AOL Hometowns and no credentials.

grat said:

No, no no... The Cloud solves all mankind's data retention needs. It's infallible. It's a panacea. Old Gregg said so.

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grat said:

Gregg, no digital solution is perfect, and the sooner people realize that, the better. When a company like Apple can release an OS with a setuid 0 script, that uses an environment variable to determine if you're root, you realize that no one is perfect. And then you run across the exploit used by a particular spyware package that used a PDF that was actually a GIF that would use the image data to create a virtual CPU to run the malware-- and you realize that all bets are off, because before last month, I would have sworn such an attack isn't possible.

No physical copy is indestructible either, unless you consider something like the golden record on Voyager-- and that's not indestructible, it's just highly resistant to time.

Right now, the chances of someone accidentally deleting data they believe is on the cloud, is higher than the chances that my notebooks of printfile negative holders will be destroyed. But both are possible.

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Old Gregg said:

@Paul Howell keeping the negatives is a good idea, but suggesting that cloud services are less reliable or less durable or less secure than someone's house is just absurd. The probabilities of of mice peeing on your negatives, or house fire/flood/earthquake are all higher than probability of your scans disappearing after clicking "backup to cloud" checkbox in your backup software. The biggest threat to digital assets is human error - forgetting the checkbox, or deleting your data by mistake (humans always manage!)

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I don't know that I would agree....I have all my computer data back to 1981 backed up physically on external hard drives, and haven't lost anything.....yes that's forty years of data. I already know plenty of people who have lost data due to cloud services messing up. Reputable services they pay for. And don't get me started on OneDrive, which my employers make far too much use of.

I'm custodian of literally thousands of rolls worth of negatives...my own, my late father's, other deceased family members....several hours of 8mm cine film from my late grandfather....because I'm the only one in the family who knows what to do with it all. Basic precautions seem sufficient to keep everything safe. I was scanning some negatives from the 1930s and 1940s over lockdown so elderly family members could identify people and locations.

Thinking of why most labs offer processing with or without other services, some users prefer to scan at home. Lab scans are not always how the end user wants them, especially if they're automatically generated by the mini lab with minimal input from the operator. If one is going to spend time editing the scans from the lab, why not also scan at home too and have full control over the scanning process. Since C41 and E6 are wholly standardised film development processes, there ought to be little to no difference between labs offering to develop the film - assuming they are competent and use fresh chemistry. B&W is another kettle of fish entirely, but we're in the colour area.

It's also possible that someone might have reasons to use a specific business to process their film, and another to scan or make optical prints. Perhaps supporting a local lab which is convenient to drop off film. Or for price reasons. Get the film processed at your local friendly mini lab, but they don't do traditional optical prints so mail the negatives off somewhere else for those.

I have a question. If it hasn't been important enough yet for you to produce prints to give to family members or put into photo albums, why would anyone bother to do that after your dead? What's the point of saving thousands of negatives, chromes, and/or digital files in a shoebox or on the cloud?

My point is that shouldn't you be doing that now?. Make digital slide shows and save them onto memory cards and give them to friends and/or relatives. Or make up prints for a photo album or frame them and give them as gifts to the people you love. What are you waiting for? Do you really think some relative after your death is going to go through all those negatives, or worse and more difficult to expect, pay to print them up to see what's there?

If you think you want to save them to make a relative rich someday like Vivien Meier, well, if they're worth squat now, what makes you think they'll be worth any more later? (Maybe you should add Malouf to your will?)

You really need to curate your photos now. Pull out the best or the most representative of the family and friend shots, and make an album. Or scan them onto a memory card and give them to family members now. Let them enjoy them now too. Forget the rest. If they're not worth anything to you now, they'll be worthless to others later too. Do something of value with them now (of the ones you care about.).

Alan Edward Klein said:

You really need to curate your photos now. Pull out the best or the most representative of the family and friend shots, and make an album. Or scan them onto a memory card and give them to family members now. Let them enjoy them now too. Forget the rest. If they're not worth anything to you now, they'll be worthless to others later too. Do something of value with them now (of the ones you care about.).

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I agree. You don't know what might be of interest to someone else in the future (say a great great grandchild) but you can't really worry about it, either.

However, photos are generally not of interest until they become a record of the past, even to the people in them. Family photos may mean nothing to someone until the people in them are gone. So the photos you give may be seen as disposable by the viewer, and a memory card is something that is as easily erased as it is viewed. You know, shove it in the camera and format it to use. So, try as you might, you may or may not be giving people something they keep. For family photos, photo books are probably the best bet at present. They take up little space and don't feel temporary or disposable.

The likelihood of an SD card being readable 30 years after its manufacture is also pretty low.

Cloud storage and archiving of negatives are mostly for the person who owns them, anyway. Pretty much anything you want someone else to have for any amount of time has to be in a printed form.

Don Heisz said:

I agree. You don't know what might be of interest to someone else in the future (say a great great grandchild) but you can't really worry about it, either.

However, photos are generally not of interest until they become a record of the past, even to the people in them. Family photos may mean nothing to someone until the people in them are gone. So the photos you give may be seen as disposable by the viewer, and a memory card is something that is as easily erased as it is viewed. You know, shove it in the camera and format it to use. So, try as you might, you may or may not be giving people something they keep. For family photos, photo books are probably the best bet at present. They take up little space and don't feel temporary or disposable.

The likelihood of an SD card being readable 30 years after its manufacture is also pretty low.

Cloud storage and archiving of negatives are mostly for the person who owns them, anyway. Pretty much anything you want someone else to have for any amount of time has to be in a printed form.

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You reminded me of those hurricane and tornado disasters that blow apart homes. People are digging through the rubble looking for the photo albums as one of their priorities.

My parents recently reduced their collection of slides, which is all my dad ever shot. They now have 360 images covering their lives and mine, period. They had everything professionally scanned and just last week delivered a USB drive with the images to me and my brother. They also made a guide so we would know who was in all the pictures. I'm glad they went to the effort. Now it's my turn, as they also have a bunch of prints from generations past. I'll be scanning all that stuff for them, and we'll go through the identification process once again for the next generation. It's good fun to see all these images.

The slides mostly survived intact btw, but some were quite dusty or had mold or something growing on them. Never mind that though, they're great. I dropped all the images into a Powerpoint and we had a "slideshow" for my kids on my tv, and it was a huge hit. They apparently had no idea any of their relatives were ever young. ;-)

Edit to add:
I remember hearing on a Lenswork podcast the advice that basically said if you want your photographs to survive you, distribute prints to family and friends. I think that's good advice and I follow it, along with the other precautions in this thread. My parents' slides were never backed up until last year, and now they're digitized in four locations, including the cloud.

warden said:

My parents recently reduced their collection of slides, which is all my dad ever shot. They now have 360 images covering their lives and mine, period. They had everything professionally scanned and just last week delivered a USB drive with the images to me and my brother. They also made a guide so we would know who was in all the pictures. I'm glad they went to the effort. Now it's my turn, as they also have a bunch of prints from generations past. I'll be scanning all that stuff for them, and we'll go through the identification process once again for the next generation. It's good fun to see all these images.

The slides mostly survived intact btw, but some were quite dusty or had mold or something growing on them. Never mind that though, they're great. I dropped all the images into a Powerpoint and we had a "slideshow" for my kids on my tv, and it was a huge hit. They apparently had no idea any of their relatives were ever young. ;-)


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That's pretty much what I've done with my slides, scanning them and putting them in video slide shows on memory cards to be played on smart TV, computers, etc. I've given them to my daughter as a family keepsake as well as keeping them for myself. Hers are back up to mine. I also have a lot of slide shows of trips my wife and I have taken. I'm not sure my daughter wants those.

.. and seriously, ruthlessly curate your collections. Most film photographers know that they didn't get 36 keepers on that last roll of film. Tell your story, via your photos, succintly rather than leaving a rambling, visually verbose messy pile of images.

Later generations whose life story is held on their cell phones probably haven't cottoned to this yet and I fear that the cloud repositories will be overrun with trillions of pics of their collective lunches and not-so-cute cat videos. (I'm not a cat hater by any means but I have my limits).

I wonder at what point we cleared up Randall's confusion, assuming we have ? Judging by his responses, the last being as far back as Friday we may done the job then

pentaxuser

There was an advertising slogan used a few years ago by Fuji (locally) "If you want to keep it, print it".

When I had my shop/minilab, very few customers brought in old negatives, and if they did they always asked had we a viewer that they could use to view the images as most people can't ready a negative, the image means nothing to them. (transparencies / slides were different).

Print from print and print from slides, by comparison, was a huge business, because people could see what was of interest and only got the ones they wanted copied. The shoe box or biscuit tin of prints is, in my opinion, more valuable than the box of negatives.

Regarding curating collections of films.....I already have the "keepers". I've ended up with boxes of negatives and cine films from several deceased relatives, one of whom was a keen amateur photographer for over 40 years. The vast majority of the material I've ended up with is good, so I think the duffs have already been weeded out. I've got them all because nobody else in the family has the knowledge of what they are, or how to view the slides, how to scan the negatives. I am the only one who has 8mm and super 8 projectors and a (Wolverine clone) scanner. But they've already been thinned out by the original photographers, except for my dad's stash of negatives which isn't huge and is the most personal to me. Prints, especially older colour ones, can fade. Those negatives are pristine. Prints of me which have adorned the wall since I was a toddler have faded, but the negatives are in perfect condition.

What i've been doing while I wasn't able to attend my place of work, once it was permitted, was getting some of the boxes to my mother and another to an elderly aunt who can identify people and places in the photos...and write the details on the back of prints or on the sleeves of negatives. Where there are no prints I've scanned negatives and revealed family memories long forgotten. And I am perceptive enough to know that I don't know what people will be interested in, long in the future. What I've already seen is photos I shot myself as a child being dismissed at the time, only for the subjects to come to me 40 years later wanting to see them. Obviously the subjects of 80 year old photos are mostly long dead, but their descendants might at least want to see them. I've put together documents and photos about a great grandfather who nobody acknowledged as he was a gypsy. The family basically pretended he had a different background and when he died in the 1920s quietly forgot him....through these photos and some other documents I've been able to dig up his actual past, find a handful of photos and I even know where his grave is....hoping to visit that with my mother this year as nobody in the family tends it.

Quite what I shall do with all of this in the future is uncertain but I do envisage making some sort of digital version available to the two sides of the family, with relevant photos and data. I am currently chasing up leads to an arm of the family with whom we lost touch 40 years ago, where a relative lives surprisingly close by (15 miles)...all as a result of digging up negatives. I've also learned that "great uncle Brian" had at least two wives simultaneously and took the most beautiful photos of them, and wrote them lovely poems.

but what has all this to do with labs offering processing only? I suppose it would be one reason for the existence of separate scan only services.

I still think that there are people who don't fancy processing film, especially colour film, themselves.....but who have the ability to either project slides or to scan negatives and perhaps select a few to have printed. Getting wet chemicals out isn't something everyone wants to do. And even if colour film isn't *that* much more difficult that B&W it does need more chemicals, more space and more temperature control. And for a long time, colour processes have been standardised. In theory, any lab operated by someone who's competent with equipment that is working will produce the same processing results as any other similar lab. With B&W you have many more options in terms of developing chemicals, agitation regimen, what contrast you like and so on.

Agulliver said:

making some sort of digital version available to the two sides of the family,

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I have tried to get relatives to supply any older negatives and prints they have (that I don't already have) to scan but they are all exceptionally reluctant to part with them. Everyone likes and comments on these photos when posted on Facebook - I know, because I have posted every one I have. So, I've given up on it. Unfortunately, it's the younger people who miss out because they don't yet know that they'll want to see these picture.

Can't speak for the habits of other nations, nor I suppose can I speak of my own nation other than a few of my own and other families of our yester-years with any great confidence but my experience is that usually in some old box/biscuit tin there are gems of pictures long since dog-eared, cracked etc. Each gem is one print with the vital negative long since lost or destroyed as if it was the neg that had no value despite it being the vital seed corn from which a pristine print can be re-printed again and again

We've always had difficulties as a species with planning for the long term. Some of the worst of our species in that respect occupy positions in government or stock exchanges

pentaxuser

pentaxuser said:

negative long since lost or destroyed

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My parents tossed all the negatives from when I was young, which was unfortunate. Many photos were taken using a 126 Instamatic but printed to 3.5x5 - which results in a heavy crop at either the top or bottom of the photo (depending what way the film went in the enlarger, I guess). It made for a lot of inept-looking photography.

I think this is the problem with photographers... always looking for the negatives.

grat said:

I think this is the problem with photographers... always looking for the negatives.

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Most photographers these days never have to look for the negatives. They hold what looks like a small solid wallet up, press a button and et voila there it is

pentaxuser

grat said:

I think this is the problem with photographers... always looking for the negatives.

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A photographer is the only one who needs the negative to accentuate the positive.

pentaxuser said:

Can't speak for the habits of other nations, nor I suppose can I speak of my own nation other than a few of my own and other families of our yester-years with any great confidence but my experience is that usually in some old box/biscuit tin there are gems of pictures long since dog-eared, cracked etc. Each gem is one print with the vital negative long since lost or destroyed as if it was the neg that had no value despite it being the vital seed corn from which a pristine print can be re-printed again and again

We've always had difficulties as a species with planning for the long term. Some of the worst of our species in that respect occupy positions in government or stock exchanges

pentaxuser

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When I retired I threw out all my negatives of family-type pictures keeping only the prints in the photo albums I had assembled at the time they were taken. I never use the negatives that I could think of in all these decades I had them. MY daughter can have them when I die if she ant them. I also went through all my chromes and scanned the best and made digital video slide shows. These were also mainly family vacations, birthday parties, and children shots. The ones of my daughter and other family stuff I gave to her on memory cards. Then I threw out the original chrome slides as the projector broke. Displaying slides digitally on a big 4K TV is good enough. The days of blowing them up for mounting on the wall are gone.

I have saved my medium format and large format negatives though which will probably get discarded when I die.

Alan Edward Klein said:

When I retired I threw out all my negatives of family-type pictures keeping only the prints in the photo albums I had assembled at the time they were taken. I never use the negatives that I could think of in all these decades I had them. MY daughter can have them when I die if she ant them. I also went through all my chromes and scanned the best and made digital video slide shows. These were also mainly family vacations, birthday parties, and children shots. The ones of my daughter and other family stuff I gave to her on memory cards. Then I threw out the original chrome slides as the projector broke. Displaying slides digitally on a big 4K TV is good enough. The days of blowing them up for mounting on the wall are gone.

I have saved my medium format and large format negatives though which will probably get discarded when I die.

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I hope that you do not regret throwing out the negatives and slides.

Sirius Glass said:

I hope that you do not regret throwing out the negatives and slides.

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So far, so good.

Actually, I found as I get older, there's something very nice about clearing things out. It kind of frees you up of all the clutter we collect in life that drags us down. I spent my whole life dragging stuff behind me, like old baggage filled with stuff I rarely look at. All that stuff from yesterday you think you can'l do without as you move along. Then when you get rid of it, it's like one less thing to think or worry about. Now I don't have to think about using negative to make enlargements. I have to live with what I have in the albums I created. I'm done. I'll pass it on. I did create scans and larger pictures to be shown on monitors and TV'. That will have to do for my heirs along with the prints in the photo albums. That's enough. Malouf will have to find another Meier.

I do not understand throwing away negatives or slides. They are the highest possible quality, original media of priceless memories. Whatever viewing technology we have in the future, the negatives will always yield the best image. Want to be able to revisit something decades hence? Keep the original.

Agulliver said:

I do not understand throwing away negatives or slides. They are the highest possible quality, original media of priceless memories. Whatever viewing technology we have in the future, the negatives will always yield the best image. Want to be able to revisit something decades hence? Keep the original.

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I was giving my perspective from someone who is 76. I hope you're right that I will be able to revisit this issue decades from now and be pissed off I threw out the originals.