7th May 2026
From filmrolls to digital overload
What modern archives tell us about analogue photography
While working with organisations that have large, digitised photographic collections, we’ve started to notice an unexpected trend. Often the images that come from a professional photographer can look almost identical. Across a large collection, this can be thousands of images. Why are there so many duplicates?
At first we wondered whether this was a data problem. However, the answer turned out to be something deeper, and much more relevant to how digital archives function today.
The accidental legacy of analogue
To understand the duplication, you have to go back to how photographers used to work. In the era of film, scarcity defined their behaviour:
- Rolls were limited (often 24 exposures)
- There was no instant feedback – a photographer could not see which shots worked best
- Development took time, and entire rolls were processed regardless
Under pressure photographers (especially those working for the press) had to adapt. They shot key moments multiple times to reduce risk, used remaining exposures on whatever else was happening and accepted that most images would never be used.
This surplus wasn’t intentional, it was structural. These images weren’t created to be seen. In fact they were artefacts of a workflow, by-products of a process, if you like.
Digitisation removes the filters
Today, archives are undertaking large-scale digitisation:
- Entire collections are scanned
- Metadata is applied at scale
- Everything is made accessible online
This shift is intentional and important, as preservation demands completeness. But something fundamental has changed. Where once only selected images were visible, now we can see every variation and unused frame. What was once filtered by physical and editorial constraints is now preserved and presented in full.
From scarcity to excess
Digital technology has removed the original limitations. Storage is now scalable, processing is fast and distribution can be instant. As a result, we’ve swopped scarcity for excess. If images are not carefully curated, users can face:
- Long sequences of near-identical images
- Large volumes of low distinction content
- Difficulty identifying the most relevant or “best” image
Let’s be clear: this isn’t necessarily a failure of digitisation. In fact it’s a collision between two different logics:
- Archival logic: preserve everything
- User logic: find meaning quickly
When these aren’t aligned, value becomes harder to assess.
The hidden cost of ‘keeping everything’
There’s a common assumption in digital archiving: ’if we can store it, then we should’. But storing everything isn’t neutral. Each additional image carries:
- A storage and maintenance cost
- Metadata overhead
- Cognitive load for users
- Implied importance simply by being there
In other words, more content does not mean more clarity.
A new role for archives?
This doesn’t mean archives should reduce what they preserve. But it does suggest an evolution from preservation alone to include both interpretation and presentation. The goal here isn’t to remove surplus, but to make it legible, using approaches such as:
- Grouping visually similar images
- Highlighting primary or published shots
- Layering context (primary vs supporting material)
- Designing interfaces that reduce visual noise
- Using metadata to capture intent, not just description
So the question isn’t ‘should we keep everything’, but rather ‘how do we make everything meaningful’? Because in a world where storage is abundant, attention is the real constraint.
The takeaway
Film-era photographers never intended for every frame to be seen. But now that we can see them all, archives have a choice whether to treat these images as noise, or to reinterpret them as narrative. By preserving everything, we haven’t just saved the past, we’ve revealed how it was made.
Read more about some of the inspirational women we’ve worked with in archives, libraries and museums.