View Full Version : Are picture negatives even worth saving anymore?
I'm in a huge picture clean out/reorganization. Last week, I threw out tons of duplicates of all the kids' school, sports, etc., pictures. Its hard to do, even though I'm still keeping thousands of them!
Now I'm going to start going through about 7 shoeboxes full of pics since l980. I'm really going to try to just keep the best ones........but its so hard for me to throw out pics of my kids, even if they're bad pics!
Anyhow.......I've always kept all the negatives. In this day and age of being able to recreate good pics from old pics, is there any reason at all to keep all these negatives? Actually though, we have a really nice scanner, and I just realized that it has a slot for negatives. Dang. I guess I just came up with a good reason to keep them. Although if the pictures are still good, I can probably make copies of them in the future, just from scanning the actual picture.
Any thoughts?
Thanks.
It's still very much a work in progress - but I've been scanning negatives with a cheapo negative scanner I bought (not good enough for 8 x 10's, but definitely ok for 4 x 6's or facebook). My grown daughters do like going through them, and they can copy/email/facebook the ones they like. I know the scans are going to outlast the original prints (some are over 30 years old).
I would definitely save them. Just as soon as we can see our way clear to purchase a scanner, I'm going to get busy and transfer old prints/photos to digital format.
I pitched all my negatives last time we moved, and I have not regretted it. It's been 9 years now and I have not once wished that I had those negatives, nor gone looking for them.
There really are pros and cons to each side, aren't there? In all the years I've taken pictures, organized them, etc, only one time have I had to sort through old negatives to find the match of a picture that got ruined in an album, yet I, too, have mounds of negatives for everything! On that side of the coin, holding onto negatives really doesn't make sense.
Scanning an original negative with a high-quality (that is, professional) negative scanner will result in a sharper picture than a scan of a print. All that said, however, much depends on whether the focus of the original picture was sharp, the persons maintaining and operating the scanner doing the job right, and so on. If you're talking just casual pictures that you otherwise are happy to print on your home printer, scanning an existing picture or reprinting from a digital scan of a print will give you perfectly serviceable results.
SteveinMN. Thank you so kindly for the insight. When the time comes for me to start, I'm going to seek out the help of yourself along with another member on the forum Re: :)
I just wish it wasn't so darned hard to figure out what's on the negatives! They should sell a small device that you can run the negative sheets through and it easily shows you what pics they are.
I just went through 2 shoe boxes filled with pics and negatives, and there must be thousands of negatives. And I really can't tell what's on the negative by just holding it up to a light.
A friend has a negative from the late 40's of a small group that she wants to share and has asked every local professional shop if a print could be made from the old negative. All have told her that it is simply not possible since the technology to do so is gone, absolutely not available.
Some of you are finding another way to get that print by scanning the negative - so what place could I refer my friend to get this done?
LOL, Cathy! Boy, do I hear you on that! I cursed and cursed going through the countless strips to find the one I was after.
I just wish it wasn't so darned hard to figure out what's on the negatives! They should sell a small device that you can run the negative sheets through and it easily shows you what pics they are.
Cathy, if you have a scanner (of any quality) or one of those all-in-one printers, you could just put a bunch of strips on the scanning bed, scan the lot of them (even moderately low resolution is fine), look at the resulting image, and zoom in/magnify on each negative as you wish. You don't even need to keep the scanned image (or you could redo it at the best resolution). Just keep track of the images/strips you want and it'll go a lot faster.
A friend has a negative from the late 40's of a small group that she wants to share and has asked every local professional shop if a print could be made from the old negative. All have told her that it is simply not possible since the technology to do so is gone, absolutely not available.
Some of you are finding another way to get that print by scanning the negative - so what place could I refer my friend to get this done?
razz, I think the problem your friend is encountering is that a negative that old probably is not the same size as the 35mm negative that became pretty standard around the 60s. Scanning for negatives tries to pull a lot of information from a small piece of film, so you want the film to be very "nailed down" while the scanning is being done.
If the quality your friend needs is not critical, it is possible she could get decent results from scanning the negative as if it were a slide. If she can find a very high quality flatbed scanner (4800 dpi or higher) (possibly at camera store or at a photodeveloping shop that takes longer than an hour to do its work:) or maybe even on-line), she could place the negative on the bed enough times to scan the entire negative. Then she could "stitch" the resulting images into one (there is software out there that can do this or it can be done manually with patience and skill). The image still will look like a negative, but there are many image-manipulation programs out there (Photoshop is one that many people have heard of, though there are many which are much cheaper) which should be able to take the negative's exposure value and turn it into a black-and-white or sepia-tone print. It won't be an heirloom-quality print after all that manipulation, but it should be visible and serve at least an informational purpose.
Steve.......thanks for that suggestion. Everything is at a standstill with our nice scanner right now though. DH took the computer that the scanner is attached to to his office to get some upgrades......about a year ago.....and hasn't brought it back yet! He buys all this really nice stuff and never gets around to making it work. >8)
I'm just totally overwhelmed with all these pictures and negatives......but I just can't seem to let them go.
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