By David Gewirtz
Now that Denise and I are married, we've found ourselves merging our two households. Between us, our stuff took up two homes worth of space, and we've been actively purging so everything will fit comfortably into our one home.
Both of us have a lot of stuff and we both come from families of packrats, so we've seen how no good can come from saving everything. In fact, we've recently taken to watching the Discovery Channel program Clean Sweep and the HGTV program Mission: Organization for both inspiration and instruction. While I'd definitely recommend these two programs to anyone trying to get out from under a lifetime's worth of crap, both programs have made recommendations regarding photographs that are, in two words, incredibly dumb.
"My wife had to physically restrain me from attacking the TV."
On a variety of episodes, in both programs, the professional organizers have recommended that to organize old photographs, you toss out your negatives and only keep the prints. One organizer even went so far as to say, "This is the new millennium. Negatives are so last century."
My wife had to physically restrain me from attacking the TV.
Digital cameras and scanners are amazing equipment, and many of us have moved beyond film. But film cameras still often take better pictures than digital cameras, and film is likely to be with us for quite a while.
More to the point, prints are poor cousins to negatives when it comes to photo quality. Remember, when the picture was taken with your film camera, the actual scene being photographed was directly exposed onto the film. Those negatives are that film. Those negatives are your originals.
Prints are made from the negatives, so they're always a second generation in terms of quality. Further, when prints were generated by quick print shops or lower quality labs, image quality suffered even more. And prints were often created without capturing the full width of the film--so elements of the photo that exist on the negative are completely unseen in the print.
There's another factor to consider: the resolution of the negative is going to be vastly higher than that of your print--often an order of magnitude better in terms of the level of detail stored on the negative.
Yes, today's scanners can often take a print and bring it nicely into your computer. But negative scanners exist and are now rather inexpensive. Personally, while I have a high-end digital SLR, my best pictures still come from scans of the negatives produced by my film camera.
So far, what I've argued is basically a case for quality. That is, keeping your negatives gives you the best chance to have a quality reproduction of your original image. But there's an even better reason for keeping your negatives: you'll have a backup copy of your precious images.
If you're really starved for space, don't toss your negatives. Instead, send them to Mom and Dad, or to a family friend. Keep them off-site. This way, if something really bad happens to your home, you won't lose all your precious family history. Instead, you'll have backups of your photos, and you'll be able to reconstruct some of those favored moments.