Sept. 2001
President's
Message
Portrait
of Bob Coffey
Article - "Filing Your Transparencies and Negatives"
Filing Your Transparencies and Negatives
- Bill Talarowski
During my many years in photography, I have searched endlessly for the perfect filing system. I wouldn’t say the present system is perfect, but it’s a long way from boxes, trays, and albums I started with.
I began in 1952 and have approximately
70,000 transparencies and 30,000 black & white and color negatives.
Something had to be done to be able to find the images.
Strangely, a decision to get into the stock business helped get me started
on this formidable task. I found that agencies had to have the following
information on the slide: copyright symbol, name, index number, description
(including location, activities, names of buildings, route numbers, etc.).
All this must fit on one wide side on the front of the mount leaving the
other for the agency information.
I placed all transparencies in archival plastic pages that held twenty mounts. I also decided to put these so that I could grab a whole section at a time. I could have chosen hanging files as well but with a limit of only four drawers for filing, it would make for tight spacing and I felt that binders would be easier to work with . Admittedly, viewing slide pages in a binder was a pain in the neck (literally), but it was faster than working with hanging files.
It became evident that a date
had to be incorporated as well. Considering how much work was ahead I
opted to use a computer program rather than do it by hand. This had an
added advantage of producing digital files that would not only be used
as an index but for locating images as well. I choose the Cradoc Caption
Writer program produced by Perfect Niche Software Inc., 602-945-2001.
The program sold for $69.00 with 2,500 special labels (two on each side
by side). Extra labels could also be purchased.
The program allows for five lines of type but I found four lines made
for better legibility. On the first line I placed a registered R, my name,
a squiggly line for separation, then the transparency number. The number
started with the year, the month, the day, a dash, then the consecutive
number of exposure taken. The final two numbers would increase by one
with each label. The second line was always the location, with the third
and fourth lines for activities, building names or special information
that described the image. You could put two or three sub-topics on a line
as long as you separated them with a coma and didn’t exceed 23 characters.
With the digital file and with the help of Quattro Pro, a spread sheet program, I was able to produce copy of the file numbers with information contained in the transparency of my whole storage of images. When looking for an image, I generally can remember what subjects have been taken and about what time of year I took them. I pull the binder that is marked with the year I’m looking for, open to the year, month and day and search for the topic from there on. It usually takes about ten minutes to locate what I am looking for. From there on it’s the normal good business practices of filing, billing and shipping that has to be done.
I know that most of you are not interested in images for the stock business, but I have found this system works equally well as a normal functioning system for all images taken in our photographic pursuit. Again, it seems like it was a smooth transition of ideas and thoughts I had which is anything but the truth. This was my first computer project and if it hadn’t been for the help that I received from Ernst Tomic, I would never have gotten into the stock business and my transparencies would be in a conglomeration of trays, boxes and albums.