The Film Preservation Project is a scanning and digitization service that provides careful, precise digitizations of your family’s photographic film negatives and slides. We turn your forgotten film into images you can save, share, and cherish.
We love film photography, and we scan new film too!
As a child, I would page through our families photo albums for hours. I loved seeing photographs of my parents that my grandparents had printed in their darkrooms decades earlier. I would marvel at prints of my sister and me only a handful of years earlier, but taken before we were able to form memories. It was a marvelous experience.
As I would pour over old photos, I wondered how they would look if I could see them in a larger format. Thoughts of my mom and I dropping off sleeved strips of 35mm negatives for reprints and enlargements for the occasional framed gift to a grandparent or relative, along with the seemingly constant reminder from my dad to, "keep your fingers off the negatives!" instilled in my brain early on that the negatives, not so much the prints, were the key to a photograph's information.
Fast forward a few decades. Sadly, my grandparents and their darkrooms are gone and my family's photo albums are several states away, but the negatives and slides that produced the prints in the albums are still here, safe with me. In 2011, I began digitizing my family's film negatives and slides so that they could be viewed and appreciated by everyone in my family. As I worked on that project, friends and neighbors got excited after seeing the results and began to ask me to digitize their families' negative and slide collections. As I digitized more and more of my friends and families' film negatives and slides, I developed processes and equipment that increased the quality of the digitizations and made my workflow more efficient, all the while gaining immense satisfaction from seeing the reactions of people who were seeing what their parents, grandparents, even great grandparents had photographed so many years earlier.
It is immensely important for all of us to preserve our pasts. We can learn so much about our own lives through our relatives. The Film Preservation Project helps you do just that by transforming photographic film negatives and slides into digital files that you can print, share, search, and save. We truly look forward to helping you preserve your past!
Shoot us an email or give us a call (yes, we really have a phone number!), let us know what you have, and what you would like to do.
We will respond to your query with a plan and an address for you to send your film.
Box up your negatives and slides and send them my way. Upon receiving them, we will take inventory and send over an invoice and time estimate via email.
When the invoice is paid and the time frame is okayed, digitization will begin.
As soon as digitization is complete, we will send everything back to you along with a USB drive loaded up with all of your scans. Smaller orders (under 5GB in size) will be delivered digitally via a download link.
Please note: we will provide the USB drive free of charge, while return shipping will be itemized in the original invoice. You will receive a tracking number via email to track the progress of your shipment.
With gloved hands, each negative will be carefully dusted with a rocket blower, and if necessary, a film safe brush. Strips of film will be passed through a specialized anti-static film vacuum. Only after as much dust and debris as possible is removed from a piece of film without inflicting damage, will it make its way into the appropriate piece of digitization or scanning equipment.
Once digitized, each frame is then examined for color accuracy and any large pieces of debris that could not be removed without damaging the film are removed digitally. Please note that nearly all film scans, particularly from very dirty or fungus damaged negatives and slides will retain some small spots even after being digitally "dusted." Please see the "Additional Services" section of the Services page for more information.
Following digitization, each resulting image file is given a unique name and saved as a full quality JPG file to a USB drive* to be returned to you along with your film negatives and slides.
* Smaller orders will receive images via a download link.
We don't kid ourselves into thinking that we are the be-all and end-all of digitization services. Other options exist, and we know it. For that reason, we want you to know what you will receive from us before committing to our services. Enter, the free trial. Send us up to:
And we will digitize and mail them back to you for free. We are confident you will love the results, but if you don't, you're only out the postage to send them! To get started, please drop us a line and get in touch!
