This is the end of a Word file I created for inventorying all my rolls of film, whether they be color slides or black-and-white negatives. It ends with an entry for roll number 2003-16, the final roll of film I shot, whose first image was exposed on August 8, 2003.

The idea for this "summary style" inventory for film images was born when I switched from film to digital and saw that I could no longer spend time describing every single picture I took. The previous photo shows the format I adopted for summarizing digital images.

Inventorying digital images was simple compared to film images. With digital, I used only one camera. With film, I sometimes used two cameras at once, shooting color slides and black-and-white negatives simultaneously. That created a challenge in assigning sequential roll numbers. Compounding the problem was that some rolls of negatives (from the 1970s and 80s) had yet to be developed, so knowing their place in a timeline would have to wait.

To help me plan for analyzing the images of the undeveloped rolls of film, and to ultimately combine the film records with the digital records, I created the complicated file shown here. The information in the left columns will help me determine how to order the rolls in this file. It was not as simple as black-and-white (pun intended). All the film has now been developed, but the process of ordering the rolls is not complete.

The idea of combining film records with digital records fell by the wayside when I started using Lightroom to edit and manage my digital images.