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Since I have been back in the states, and settling into a new apartment in a new city, I have decided it is finally time to put some major efforts into organizing and cataloging my film archive. I have boxes and boxes of film of all shapes and sizes, in various states of disarray, and I really want them to be as organized as my digital assets are in Aperture.

To get things started I first looked over my stuff and (after a three hour tour down memory lane) I sort of got an idea of what was in store for this project. The short answer is that this is going to be a huge amount of work, but worth it. My original film masters are very important to me and represent a period in my work before digital photography, when life was, well, largely spent in the darkroom.

After much debate about how to proceed I came up with essentially a two-pronged plan. The first part being the need to make sure every piece of film is safely stored in an archival fashion so that it will last as long as possible. My material is currently in all sorts of storage containers ranging from archival PrintFile folders to manilla envelopes to still in the can, undeveloped. So, my first task will be to come up with something more consistent and systematic.

The second part of my two-pronged plan has to do with cataloging everything. Since I have been an Aperture user for so long I have come to take for granted the power of digital photography when it comes to asset management. None of my film masters have any metadata associated with them, whatsoever. Some of the PrintFile folders have a few random notes, or a date, but thats about it. Most of this will have to be from memory.

At first I had thought about using Aperture to catalog everything, but this would essentially mean that I would have to start off scanning film and creating the digital version of each asset. From a purely theoretical point of view, every entry in Aperture begins with some sort of image. So if you have no image, it’s hard to conceptualize creating a place holder in Aperture.

The Database

To get past all of this I came up with a pretty simple solution. I would build a fairly simple database to catalog all of my film, and create some sort of link to material in Aperture.I shopped around a bit and after realizing that there really wasn’t a perfect off the shelf solution, I decided to go with the cheapest, and surprisingly most elegant alternative, Bento.

Bento is to FileMaker Pro as iWeb is to Dreamweaver, or better yet, as iPhoto is to Aperture. Well, it would seem that way at first. In fact, Bento (made by the folks at Filemaker) is a pretty powerful yet easy to use database tool. It looks and feels like any other iLife app, and as well, it nicely integrates with them.



To design my database in Bento (which is only about $50) I had to make a few decisions. First of all, I wanted to come up with a base unit for my entires. Would my base unit be each “frame” or image, just like it is in Aperture? Or, would that just be too much work. Well, in the end I decided that I would make a “piece of film” my base unit. A piece of film could be anything from a single 4x5 sheet, to a strip of 6 35mm frames. I thought about going by each roll as my base unit, or even each shoot, but after looking at how disorganized all my film was, I thought that if I went down to the level of a piece of film, I could at least use that to help organize things in the future.

Storage

To get things going I really needed a decent system for storing and filing everything--one that would work for all the different types of materials I had accumulated over the years. So here is what I have, piled up in shoe boxes and binders full of PrintFiles:

35mm - I have lots of 35mm material. However, this can be broken down to a few basic categories. Mounted vs. unmounted, positive vs, negative, and within negative, black and white vs. color. (I actually have a couple rolls of black and white positives!)

Medium Format - I have a good amount of 120 and 220 film, mostly color positive, all in strips, and some black and white as well.

4 x 5 - Plenty of 4 x 5 to account for, color positives, black and white and color negatives. Man I used to really love shooting 4 x 5!

Polaroid - I have a handful of salvageable type 55 4x5 Polaroid. The polaroid 4x5 is slightly larger than 4x5 inches, so I will need to be sure my system will work with it.

After looking around online I found a system of storage containers, folders and film protectors that would work with everything. These were all available at Light Impressions and are called the NegaGuard system. For what I need I actually only have two different styles of boxes. One for all of the unmounted film, and one for the mounted 35mm slides. Within the unmounted boxes, I ordered two for the 35mm and 120 film, and a separate one for the 4x5 and Polaroid type 55.

This system is pretty nice, and should work out just fine. Each kit comes with a box, a pile of manilla looking folders and seamless clear envelopes for the film. You put the film in the envelope, the envelopes in the folders and the folders in the box. Easy-peasy.

Getting Started

Once I received my NegaGuard kits, I had to design the database and get working. My Bento database is pretty simple, but it has a few key features that are important. First of all, the base unit, a piece of film, is where it all begins. Each piece of film gets a unique ID number and this is the index for the database. Bento has a data type called “Automatic Numbering” which is essentially an index for each record. The number increments by your design every time you make a new entry.



As for fields, I started by adding fields to indicate the physical location of each entry. The shelf number, the box number, and folder number were added and tell me exactly where a piece of film exists in real life.



I also added fields for the name of the shoot, and some descriptive information about the film. Then I went ahead and added fields that were fairly similar to IPTC metadata. The cool thing about Bento is that I can always go back and add more fields as needed.

Aperture and Bento

Although Aperture and Bento are not directly linked, I did want to think ahead a little bit. Maybe someday in the future they will be linked up, or maybe I will write some amazing Applescript that will do that job for me. Until then I simply made a few fields having to do with Aperture.



I added a field that is the name of the project in Aperture where I might have scans of the same pieces of film. I also made a checkbox field that indicates to me in Bento if I have a high-res scan available in Aperture. This is purely for convenience, and should help me figure out what still needs to be scanned, when I get to that point.

I also was able to pull preview images from Aperture for display in Bento. This is really cool. On every form in my Bento database, I have displayed what I call a “sample image.” This isn’t the full res final piece of scanned work, but usually a low res scan of one frame from a 35mm strip. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just a visual clue as to what the real life film master is. To get at my Aperture library from Bento I simply created a media field, and when I click on the icon to add an image, I am able to choose from my iPhoto or Aperture libraries, just so long as I have previews generated in Aperture for the images I am looking for.

Now The Hard Part

Now that I have a pretty decent system for cataloging all this stuff I have my work cut out for me. I have years and years of photography dating back to my days as a high school newspaper photographer. Most of the work looks pretty clean and safe, but there is a bunch that may need salvaging. This is going to be some tedious work, but in the end I think it will be worth it. Maybe I should run down to the photo school and see if I can recruit a small team of eager interns!

This whole process really points out just how lucky we are as digital photographers. Metadata is an amazing thing, and the ability to instantly have two exactly matching copies of a single image is incredible. I just wish there was some sort of online backup system for my film masters like there is for all of my digital files! Now that would be something.

NOTE: You casn check out the screenshots of my Bento database over at my flickr account by clicking here.