Did it get better?

You get better with age and experience. Unfortunately, at the beginning you know squat. And the early mistakes will always follow and haunt you. My database was on index cards transferred to an Excel spreadsheet.

It is parsimonious for key words and information. You will not find slide cabinet as a key word to look up.

Equally, my slides are stored in drawers. The rolls are consecutively filed. One set of drawers resides in a closet stacked one upon another impossible to comb thru easily.

Digitized with a dedicated (out of manufacture) slide scanner, the images reside on multiple redundant hard drives. Good? Eh? No, the slides were scanned in batches on different dates and reside in multiple places. Try to find and follow consecutively, only I know how to look. Oh bother!?

But everything is preserved – except my earliest black and white negatives. They live in my brother’s house somewhere.

Meanwhile I know where my stuff is. No one else does. And it can be pretty near impossible for me to find things too.