Digitising a photographic archive: what 12,000 negatives cost
Published on June 1, 2026
Equipment, handling time, description and ten years of storage. The most expensive line is not the one anyone budgets for.
An archive of 12,000 film negatives was digitised over fourteen months. The original budget covered scanning and was overrun by 60%, without the scanning itself going wrong.
Scanning is cheap: about 40 dinars a frame in house once the workstation is paid off. Handling costs more, because one negative in six needed cleaning and one in forty was stuck to its neighbour.
Description is the line that exploded. A file with no caption, no date and no place is not consultable; it is a file lost on a disk. Documenting one frame takes four to twelve minutes depending on what the archive allows you to recover, and it is 70% of the final cost.
Ten years of storage is predictable and modest, provided the preservation format is decided at the start and nobody keeps three derivatives of every frame out of caution.
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