I’ve spent the past fortnight gathering images for my guide to landscape photography ebook. In the process, I’ve found myself rifling through both physical and digital files for images to edit and use to illustrate it.

It’s been a long task: I’m working through two hard drives full of images, most filed by place and date. A large minority are not. At one point, I found a large file of untouched images. At another, I lost about a month’s worth in a mistaken purge (I imagine they’ll turn up again).

On the physical side, negatives, prints and slides taken over previous decades are in envelopes, files and folders and boxed within various crates in the loft. Their contents have been listed but not properly catalogued: finding particular prints and slides has been time consuming.

As the photos are collated and arrangements are made to take new images to complement them, I wonder what method of cataloging I can do in future to speed up such a process, or at least allow me better knowledge of what photographs I have? Definitely one to research in future.