How long do negatives last?

DBP · Mar 11, 2007

bdial said:
Digital has no good answer for permanence on the scale we like to think of it, anyway.

I recently lost a bunch of files to a five year old CD that had been stored in my office - it just suddenly became unreadable. Wish there were a convenient way to store my files on a medium as good as black and white film, or Kodachrome.

kjsphoto · Mar 11, 2007

I feel your pain. When I used to work in journalism we were forced to use digital. I backed all my work up of every digital image I ever captured on DVD's ( two each ) to find years later 50% of them are no longer readable or recoverable. I even had LaCie external hard drives fail as well.

If I would have shot the assignments on film I would still have it.

These days I only shoot film regardless. If they need a digital file I scan it.

film_guy · Mar 11, 2007

I have some B&W negative from my parent's childhood and even my grandparents' teenage years (approx. 85+ to 90+ years' old) which still look great. They also have some sepia-colored film from way back which look pretty good. I'm sure any lab will be able to print off them, since I don't have any printing methods of my own currently.

Woolliscroft · Mar 12, 2007

I know that this is the B&W forum, but longevity is likely to be more of an issue with colour negs, which is why I take a lot of my archaeological site records on both B&W and colour, even though the colour information is fairly fundamental. That said, I am 47 and my Kodacolour baby pictures are still perfectly printable. I have to print a lot of inter-war nitrate stock and find it still usable, whilst 19th century glass plates seem to be virtually eternal if you don't drop them. Incidentally, I would joint the warnings about the flammability of nitrate film. It catches easily and burns very fiercely, almost explosively and, rumour has it, can spontaneously combust. It's not good stuff to keep around the house without taking fire control precautions.

David.

copake_ham · Mar 12, 2007

kjsphoto said:
I feel your pain. When I used to work in journalism we were forced to use digital. I backed all my work up of every digital image I ever captured on DVD's ( two each ) to find years later 50% of them are no longer readable or recoverable. I even had LaCie external hard drives fail as well.

If I would have shot the assignments on film I would still have it.

These days I only shoot film regardless. If they need a digital file I scan it.

This is an interesting point. I am film shooter with scanning capabilities also. While it is certainly true that the upfront work flow takes longer; the image permanence factor is a paramount concern.

Unfortunately, in the commercial fields this permanence is not held as high esteem as the ability to rapidly produce and process an image.

And in the world of the digiP&S consumer - we may soon see a generation of folk who will have no family photographic record - something not seen since Mr. Eastman first introduced the box camera.

ully · Mar 12, 2007

100+ years

richard littlewood said:
Ages

I have pictures my dad and uncle took between 1900 and 1940 and they all still look pretty good.

htmlguru4242 · Mar 12, 2007

I have a stack of negatives from ~1930-1960. They're all 6x9cm, and were stacked on top of each other in an envelope in a drawer for at least 40 years. They're a tad brittle, but still look good and would be printable.

A friend of my parents also has some glass plate negatives and sheet film negs. starting from the late 1800s, and going up through the 1930s (the sheet film is from the early 1930s onwards). Aside from one or two broken / scratched plates (from handling mistakes), they all look amazing.

So I guess the answer is, with proper storage, for a very, very long time.

Color, of course, is a different story altogether.

Paul Hillman · Nov 23, 2017

Sorry as this is a B&W forum? Just trying to add a data point.

I just looked through some 120 color film negatives from mid - late 70's. Processed by a professional processor, not drug store. They were stored in negative sleeves that were somewhat like parchment paper, those in a 3 ring binder, stored here in New Mexico at room temperature in the house, but very dry. These negatives exhibited obvious fading and color shift. Other similar 35 mm negatives in clear sleaves seem just fine. I scanned these 120 images with an Epson V700? scanner, one of thier best, but not a dedicated film/transparency scanner. It was fairly easy to color correct and contrast enhance in software. Might be best to scan in using 48 bit mode to obtain the best results after correction. Since some here say they have had better luck with color in worse conditions, I wonder how good these sleeves are for storage.

Pioneer · Nov 23, 2017

Very interesting thread. I suspect that for most of us physical damage or disposal is the greatest threat to any negatives we have and the idea of long term storage is not uppermost in our minds.

While the practices of large museums, archives and the like are interesting, I wonder what most of the people here do for storage of their negatives?

Except for a few from several years ago in glassine envelopes, all of my negatives and most positives are stored in printfile pages. They are kept in binders or storage boxes in the house (not attic or basement) so are exposed to the average heating and cooling cycles in the home but not the larger swings outdoors. There is no other special attempt to protect them from temperature and humidity swings and I seriously doubt that I could even do that, let alone afford it. I suppose I could buy some bags of dessicant to place in the storage boxes but they don't last forever and will need to be exchanged from time to time. so I don't know how practical that would be either.

Like I said, interesting topic, particularly if you look at it from your personal storage practices.

trendland · Nov 23, 2017

terri said:
This might sound like a rather simpleton type of question, but how long can one reasonably expect a routinely developed, properly washed negative to last? On another forum a poster was asking how to clean some old family negatives, and one reply was to simply digitalize them, and update the digitial file every couple of years, and not bother much with the cleaning and archival storage of them, since they would ultimately crumble to dust.
I took exception to that reply, but am not entirely sure how to refute it, or even if I should. A properly cleaned, archivally stored negative or slide...should we be thinking in terms of centuries, or just several decades?

I appreciate that the dyes in color transparencies would fade quicker, but a B&W negative would have much more staying power, wouldn't it? How long can we expect our negatives to survive?

Yeah - a real nice question ! In short : It is much more depending to the circumstances of archievement (conditions) dew point in the athmosphere(air humity), contant temperatures a.s.o. as one could imagine.
You will need a computer monitored high tech archive to reach all parameter.
By the time : How long will it last with digital storage? Billions of years or lets say : FOREVER !!!!

..fine !
Because of what reason ? Because you can make a copy from a copy from a copy and so your medium will survive forever.
In theory in practice your CD ist out of order within 6 month (without a copy)
Yout DVD is broken the copy is lost within
3 years. Your portable device is stolen (with all private photographs of a full decade in it - sure you have no copy)
Well the nude pictures of your secretary (from secret holyday last year) were also
on it? Oh no - hope the police will not find your portable and give it back to your wife...
So in short digital pictures are not save at all. Just in theory the are FOREVER (Nasa missed construction plans of Saturn V ....

due to digital storage? )
In practice with films archive experts stated : Color Films and Prints are not archievable in general !!!

Thats terrible - why is this so ?
Because they found out colors are not stabile for min. 100 years
Bw they rated as archivable and with special methods they give bw fims an prints min. 150 years.
Kodak stated 200 years ????
But to us at home lets guess (with minimum Gold archievement conditions)

- E6 Films 25 - 30 years with tollerance
to very little color lost/shifts
35 - 50 years with color shifts
50 - 70 years with massive color lost/shifts
over 70 - 80 years just bw - no colors remaining.
- K14 Films (Kodachrome)
35 - 50 years with no noticable lost of colors/shifts
50 - 70 years tollerable lost of colors/no visable shifts
over 70 years beginning massive lost of color (saturation) normal shifts.
100 - 120 years bw film (estimated)
- C 41 nearly the same like E6
- Bw min. of 70 - 90 years without visible change
90 - 120 years light damage of emulsion
(physicaly lost of parts of layers due to humity/ tollerance of temperature)
120 - 150 years some bw films still OK
most damaged from bugs and environmental reasons chemical gases/
humity a.s.o.

Is this OK to you ? Perhaps try to get data from a 80th dos discete/cardrige and imagine the year 2065 to find a operating system to your DVD / Blue-Ray medium.
My oldest bw films are from 1926 I personaly had a view on some bw films damaged (just some frames) from 1931.
But I can't say from what reasons.
WW2 ? Water from big storms through the roof in the 50th ??????
My Kodachrome from 1986 looks like yesterdays shots.

with regards

trendland · Nov 23, 2017

Photo Engineer said:
There is on on-line database somewhere which gives the support typ for just about every film, and the dates that they were converted from nitrate to modern stock. Just about all Kodak films were converted before the 50s.

The best preservation of color film is indeed to make 3 color separations and store them, recombining them into new prints as needed. Many original nitrate film based original motion pictures are stored at George Eastman House, and they are rather particular about open flames there as you can imagine.

Films from Cape Canaveral were shipped monthly to Wright Patterson AFB in Ohio. For 1 1/2 years, I had that job as one of my extra duties. Recently, I have been contaced by groups trying to reconstruct the early space age, as all of those photographs have vanished from Wright Pat. The University of Central Florida is spearheading one effort in documenting this, and I have been helping to the extent I am able. I have about a dozen or so prints that were given me duing my tour there, and I have done my bit by sharing these with the project.

The lesson learned is that photos can last a long time, as long as they are not disposed of.

PE

Very interisting issue PE. I stated just before that Nasa missed plans of construction from Saturn 5 ! Due to digital storage and change to several storage systems ?
Well - PE we both know that it is not the true (Nasa is not missing the plans) but it is a real good story to demonstrate the danger and half-live period of digital mediums.

with regards

trendland · Nov 23, 2017

Paul Hillman said:
Sorry as this is a B&W forum? Just trying to add a data point.

I just looked through some 120 color film negatives from mid - late 70's. Processed by a professional processor, not drug store. They were stored in negative sleeves that were somewhat like parchment paper, those in a 3 ring binder, stored here in New Mexico at room temperature in the house, but very dry. These negatives exhibited obvious fading and color shift. Other similar 35 mm negatives in clear sleaves seem just fine. I scanned these 120 images with an Epson V700? scanner, one of thier best, but not a dedicated film/transparency scanner. It was fairly easy to color correct and contrast enhance in software. Might be best to scan in using 48 bit mode to obtain the best results after correction. Since some here say they have had better luck with color in worse conditions, I wonder how good these sleeves are for storage.

Yes that might be a novum to c41 films.
The posibility of digital color corection (saturation) and this definitive will longer the livetime of c41 films.
Because you need prints from c41 and the step through digital is a posibility if nothing else will go.
The digital archivement is an other issue I just mentioned above.
So lets say scanning will not longer live time - but it will give then a (shorter) 2. Life.
E6 will not benefit from scanning because it is more to projection.
(Digital projection is no way to me)

with regards

Gerald C Koch · Nov 23, 2017

Robert Hall said:
So then, I would suppose, that one would clean them on the computer; so no work is saved doing that.

Then, let's think for a moment that one "updates" the digital file every so often. If you are a producing photographer, that means that you can spend the time to scan --not inconsequential-- and you keep adding to the number of files. Then you get to update them as well. At some point you, and perhaps your progeny, keep updating the files, no one will have time to take any more images due to the up keep needed to store and manage the digital files.

Could this mean that at some point we will see no one taking any more digital images?

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What may have been intended is updating the digital medium. Our vaunted digital age has an achiles heel! I haven't seen an 8 inch floppy drive in several decades. If you didn't download your files to 5-1/2 medium and then eventually to 3-1/4 then you are SOL. Can't recover what you can't read. The Library of Congress stores digital media as binary text files, 0's and 1''s. The media can always be reconstructed (although not easily) from paper print outs. NASA does something simiiar. Data from flights is stored on 20 inch paper disks as laser produced perforations. Nowadays software is often sold on a thumb drive eliminating disks entirely.

It's not only the format of the media but also the media itself. Some years ago many people found that their VHS wedding tapes could no longer be played as the magnetic media would slide off the tape. I had a similar experience a few years ago where music CD's had actually decomposed to where you could see light through them. They were unplayable.

The Library also keeps music on 15 inch 78 rpm records. The technology is so straight forward that a machine to play them is easy to construct.

Getting back to actual negatives. Silver does oxidize but still leaves and image. The hardened emulsion should last for a couple of centuries. The bugaboo here is the triacetate film base which may vinegarize.. So the film must be stored under rather strict temperature and humidity conditions. However I take some comfort in the fact that our sun will go nova in a few billion years and all traces of our existence will be lost anyway.

One final word to those that use staining developers. One poster has noted that the stain image is quickly faded by UV light. So keep such negatives in the dark.

Photo Engineer · Nov 23, 2017

trendland said:
Very interisting issue PE. I stated just before that Nasa missed plans of construction from Saturn 5 ! Due to digital storage and change to several storage systems ?
Well - PE we both know that it is not the true (Nasa is not missing the plans) but it is a real good story to demonstrate the danger and half-live period of digital mediums.

with regards

Many of the film records and tape records (digital) were destroyed by accident. Just as a reminder that this happens, look at what happened to the TV show "Dr. Who".

One of my jobs at the Cape was to send one box of classified and one box of unclassified film to storage from the Cape every month. I did this the entire time I was there, and worked with a dear friend and famous author who died last year. He was quite renowned in Russia BTW.

PE

Kodachromeguy · Nov 23, 2017

Wow, this is an old thread, but worth reviving because the debate about digital versus film permanence comes up more and more often. My experience is that digital files in theory can last indefinitely as long as someone cares and frequently transfers them to whatever new storage medium is the trendy technology of the day. As long as someone cares! Bear with me as I relate my experience. I recently retired from a US government lab where we did engineering and R&D on civil works projects (harbors, canals, etc.). Occasionally we received a Freedom of Information Act request for data on a project. This was the inevitable scenario:

1. Who worked on the project? Possibly a printed report or some memorandums provided the answer.
2. If the person had retired or left, where were his/her boxes and materials?
3. If located, sometimes the electronic media was clearly useless, such as 9-track tapes that had stuck so badly they could not be unwound.
4. If the media seemed intact, was there a machine that could read it (e.g., 9-track tapes, 4mm DAT from VAX/VMS, etc.)?
5. If a reading device was located, was there a computer that could operate that device and did it still work (e.g., the 4mm DAT needed a DEC VAX/VMS computer)? Was there anyone on staff who remembered DOS, IBM job control language or VAX/VMS?
6. If the computer existed and booted up, could someone make sense of the file structure, the content of the files, or the way that the old-time researcher labeled his files?
Usually, after spending a lot of time, we had to report to the information requester that we just did not have the data. We were not blowing them off, it was simply gone. And this was a research lab with professional tech support.

Back to the home scenario with digital pictures: do you think most families will be able to retrieve or have any interest in reviving a relative's digital files many decades hence? Some of the "photographers" (I was going to use a much more rude term) on DPReview go apoplectic when someone suggests that film might outlive their digital files. But along with their pathologic hatred of film, they have a naive belief that their cloud storage and multi-terrabyte storage devices will be maintained years or decades in the future. Not very likely......

MattKing · Nov 24, 2017

These black and white negatives are about 40 years old, and random inspections indicate that they remain in excellent shape.
Wish they were as well organized and catalogued as they have been preserved.

Bill Burk · Nov 24, 2017

I've found that film kept in plastic sleeves lasts longer. Here's an almost 40 year old example.

This is a recent scan from Eastman 5247 that was processed by RGB in Seattle (remember them?). They used to return "slides" that were really prints from the negatives which they sent back uncut, rolled in a clear plastic sleeve. I kept them as-is until just a few years ago when I cut them and put them in PrintFile pages. The original "slides" from all the rolls of 5247 that I shot back then are hoplessly faded except for one shot, that I happened to put in a glass slide mount. It's "just fine".

Poly Canyon, Design Village, April 28, 1978. Friday of Poly Royal weekend

jimjm · Nov 24, 2017

Here's a few I recently printed for a friend, who had received these negatives from a family member. They had been stored in envelopes for decades without any special care, in a trunk in an attic up in the Pacific Northwest, which is an area that can get very damp. He had no idea who was in these photos, so was very happy to see the resulting prints.

Some images had serious cracking/flaking of the emulsion, but others were in excellent condition. Most of the negs were 6x9 and larger, probably taken with Kodak Brownies and/or folding cameras. Earliest photos (below) were probably taken around WWI (1918?), and others probably go up to the 1940's.

I just used a brush to clean any loose debris from the negs, before making contact prints in the darkroom. These are scans of those prints.

Photo Engineer · Nov 24, 2017

I have good B&W negatives from the '20s and good color negatives from the '50s. The chromes from the '50s are variable, some fading and some not.

PE

Ian Grant · Nov 24, 2017

Photo Engineer said:
I have good B&W negatives from the '20s and good color negatives from the '50s. The chromes from the '50s are variable, some fading and some not.

PE

I've worked with 100+ year old glass plates and no issues, same with pre-WWII B&W film. Unless storage has been poor B&W negatives don't seem to be a problem, I used to work for a museum with their archives.

Kodachromes fro the 50's and early 60's (my fathers) have faded, Kodachrome II and later 25 no issues at all or E4 and E6. Ferrania slides (I'm assuming as bought in Italy as a pack of commercial slides sold to tourists) from 1954 are almost completely faded. Agfa and Orwo slides from about 1970-74 are also OK as are my colour negatives.

Ian

barzune · Nov 24, 2017

I have a few negatives, and a lot of snapshot prints, from my Grandfather's RNWMP trunk,
stored there since (?) 1920 (?) or so, in various basements and attics.
All are clear and bright, but I haven't bothered to check them out, because nobody cares anymore.
I suppose I should.

trendland · Nov 24, 2017

Photo Engineer said:
Many of the film records and tape records (digital) were destroyed by accident. Just as a reminder that this happens, look at what happened to the TV show "Dr. Who".
Well - I might remember to have seen simular scenes in a dokumentary.
That was like a situation a jeep with GI's drives on an airforce base - and they are carrying a metal suitcase with two locks.

with regards

Down Under · Nov 24, 2017

These threads keep resurrecting as if activating themselves, like prodigal children returning home unexpectedly to their surprised families. Well and good. So much useful information here. I recall this one from way back when, 2006-2007 or so, when it was new. Even Roger Hicks posted then. Much of the information is still current.

Sometimes there seems to be no rhyme or reason to why negatives or slides from one era survive but others don't. I have 1930s Kodachromes showing some color shift but otherwise in excellent condition, 1950s Ektachromes and Ektacolor (negatives) still in good nick, and 1980s slides that have mostly faded out. Multiple pass scanning can sometimes revive faded images of a sort from old negatives, but not with the original colors I see in some of the prints I still have.

When I was a young child in Canada my parents had a 616 Brownie and shot many films of me and my younger brother, now sadly passed away. In the early 1980s I borrowed the several hundred negatives and tried making enlargements on a Bessler 4x5 with Nikkor lenses, but these old films had been badly processed our local pharmacist who did 'D&P' in the evenings ina back room of his shop (and probably used either Kodak Tri-Chem Packs or D72)and the results were, to put it politely, somewhat horrendous. In the end I acquired a 70 year old contact printing box and did them all as contact prints. A few years later my dad passed away, my mom came down with dementia and went into nursing care, and my brother and sister-in-law cleared out the family home and all those precious negatives went to the local garbage dump. So my own contact prints and the very few original prints I have left, are the only surviving images of my early yeas and childhood. Sad, but life is like that.

In 1970 I went to Bali for two months and shot mostly Agfa slide films (I dimly recall they were branded as Agfa CT17 and CT21 then, if I'm not incorrect) which I carried around with me in my travels in a backpack and a canvas travel bag, and eventually had processed about six months later, in Melbourne. I also shot 120 Tri-X which was processed while I was on the road, in Dektol, but these print surprisingly well anyway. All my Agfa slides have survived remarkably intact. While in Bali I also shot a few rolls of Fuji color negative film, all now faded to almost clear.

Ditto slides (Kodachromes but not Kodak processed) and color negative films (mostly Kodacolor) shot during a year-long journey in North America in 1979. The slides have seriously color shifted but oddly, the images from almost all my color negatives from that time still scan almost as good as when they were processed and printed (the original prints have also all survived well).

In the '60s I was warned off using the then-popular parchment paper (I've borrowed this term from an earlier post in this thread, as I've forgotten what they were originally called) by photographers who told me their negatives stored for ten, twenty, thirty years were stuck to the paper and largely unsalvageable. I bought plastic storage sleeves by mail order from US suppliers (at the time these were not widely available in Canada) and used them from about 1968. All my B&W and a surprisingly large number of my color negatives stored in these (plastic) sleeves are fine. I've not had issues with my home-processed negatives as I was an early follower of archival processes, Kodak in particular had lots of information available on long-term image stability even at that time.

I'm now scanning many of my archival images on the basis of the most endangered images first. I store the basic scans on the larger Western Digital portable storage units and keep my backups on smaller Western Digital units. One Western Digital unit also travels with me when I'm overseas and I do downloads (mostly digital now) to it every evening.

Much of what I've written may seem like rambling and unscientific, I do apologise for the former and I've never been a technical expert in anything photographic. I believe my comments reflect many aspects of all our experiences and our time as photographers. Some of our stored images have survived, others haven't. Some will survive a lot longer, others won't. Scanning may help preserve them but even it has its downsides.

It's all about the impermanence of things, as in life.

Photo Engineer · Nov 24, 2017

I have many Agfa slides fading away as well as Fujichrome and early E6. Later Fujicrhorme and E6 seem better.

All of my Kodachromes seem OK.

I remind you all that I am probably the only one here that has done keeping tests on film and paper under controlled conditions and measured them.

PE

Lee Rust · Nov 24, 2017

Aside from a little fading here & there, the worst problems I've seen have been with slides that were processed by Fotomat in the 1970's. On many of these, the emulsion has started to decompose, while Kodak-processed transparencies from the same period are fine.

How long do negatives last?

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