Picture number 03580035?

Marek asks “have you already made more than three and a half million pictures in your life Matt?” Er, well no, not exactly. Here’s how the serial numbers work. The first four digits are the roll number. The last four digits are the frame number. Any letters indicate that there are multiple workings of that particular frame. So picture 03520008b (Thinking Wide), is the second (b) version of frame 8 of roll 352. Why 8 digits? Room for growth. Who knows, film may one day come in 9999 frame rolls ;-) I’ll wish I had gone for 16 digits when I break 10,000 rolls of film, but until then the system works.

I started using this numbering scheme just a few years back, so I actually have shot more than 382 rolls of film (scanning 383 as we speak). Really, I have. For each frame from each of those 383 rolls, there are a number of resulting files. 16 bit 3200 DPI TIFFS of the original scans get archived off to external drives. Full resolution JPEGS of every frame go into a folder on my computer for back up and quick reference. Thumbnails, the 740px wide images that end up on this site, of the edited frames go into an Index folder divided up into 50 roll sub-folders (Roll 1-50, Roll 51-100, etc). These Index folders are easy to eyeball for just the frame I’m looking for, and, since they just contain 100kb or less jpegs, they browse quickly even on my crappy computer, much faster than browsing in Photoshop for example. For each frame, the file number stays the same through all the different file sizes and types. So for frame 03520008 there’s 25mb 16bit TIFF (03520008.tiff), the PSD file I print from (03520008.psd), the full size JPEG (03520008.jpg) in the JPEGS folder, the small web sized JPEG in the Index folder (also 03520008.jpg), and the alternate version presented in the previous post (03520008b.jpg). It is not necessarily efficient for disk space concerns, but it makes things easy to find.