Original negatives

[thecatspajamas]

Originally Posted by CobbvLajoie1910

Lance -- thank you for all of your insight. This has been a great thread.

Question. How do you store your negatives? I have several I've moved into rigid top-loaders for display/easy access reasons. Though, I'm concerned that, over time, the plastic may affect the image.

Would this be problematic, or am I on the right track?

My honest answer would have to be "I don't know." I can tell you what I have done, but I'm not to the point yet where I can observe long term effects and tell first-hand whether the storage should have been done differently.

For most of the negatives that I have, I place the negative in glassine envelopes and then place the envelope in a toploader for rigidity. The glassine envelopes I purchased are specifically for archival storage of negatives, so I figure that part is safe, though them being in toploaders does add quite a bit of thickness meaning they take up more space. Then I store the toploaded negs in a box somewhere dark. For some small negatives and slides, I have also been known to place them in a standard card soft sleeve, slip that into a standard card toploader, and store them right along with the regular baseball cards.

That's just what I do though. I have purchased a many negatives from the 1930's to 1960's or so that were simply stored in a manila envelope, sometimes several to an envelope, with identification information written on the outside, and presumably filed in a file cabinet somewhere for decades. Whether this had any effect on the negative or its image quality I don't know, but if so, it was not something my lay eye could discern.

My understanding is that exposure to light and high temperatures (both to be avoided) should be of more concern than what medium the negative is stored in. I would caution when using toploaders that you should probably slip the negative into a sleeve of some sort before sliding it into the toploader to avoid creating any scratches in the image. Otherwise, just avoid high heat storage areas, and keep them in the dark.