For the seller

Found a roll of film? Do not open it

An exposed roll of film from a drawer, or still inside a camera, can very often still be developed, decades after it was shot. The image fades and the colours drift, but pictures come back from fifty-year-old rolls all the time. The two rules: do not open the camera to check, and do not open the film to look.

Film that has been shot but not developed carries what is called a latent image, and it is surprisingly patient. It does not need to be usable-looking to be developable; it needs to have been kept away from light, and after that every year mostly just adds grain and fades the colour a little further.

If the film is still inside a camera

Leave it there. Opening the back to see whether there is film fogs whatever is loaded, and the frames nearest the opening are the first to go. On most 35mm cameras a gentle turn of the rewind crank tells you if there is tension, which means film; on a Super 8 camera the cartridge shows through the film door only when the door is opened, so let a lab or an experienced hand do it in the right conditions. If you must get the film out yourself, do it in a fully dark room, by feel.

What the pictures will look like

Honest expectations: colour film loses speed and shifts colour, so decades-old rolls come back muted, grainy and sometimes beautiful in a way nobody planned. Black and white keeps far better. Some rolls come back blank, because they were never shot, were fogged long ago, or spent thirty years above a radiator. Labs that develop old film know all of this and treat the roll accordingly.

What to do

Keep rolls cool, dry and dark until they are developed. Do not open the canisters or cartridges.
Label what you know: which camera or drawer it came from, roughly which years. It helps the lab and it makes the pictures mean more.
Use a lab that handles old film. Expired-film development is its own small craft, including formats the corner lab no longer takes, and the good labs say plainly what they can and cannot do.
Develop before you decide anything else. The roll might hold the last photographs of somebody, and that is worth knowing before it travels anywhere.

Film found inside a collection

Half-shot rolls and loaded cameras turn up constantly in the collections we buy, and we treat them the way we treat the story: nothing moves until it is looked after. Film we find loaded is taken out in the dark and set aside, and photographs that are clearly family go to the family, always. Analog film is our own field — we shoot it, we test with it, and developing is part of our plans — so a found roll gets taken seriously here. What to do with the pictures once they exist is covered in what to do with old slides and negatives, and the whole-collection route is on Pass it on.

Short answers

Can old film rolls still be developed?

Usually, yes, even after decades. Expect faded colour and grain, and sometimes a blank roll; black and white survives best.

Does old film have to be developed differently?

Often, and some discontinued process types need a specialist. Tell the lab everything written on the roll.

There is film in a camera I want to sell. What now?

Say so and leave it in. We take loaded cameras as they are and deal with the film properly, and anything personal goes back to you.

A collection is not a pile of objects.

It is years of somebody deciding what was worth keeping, and sold off piece by piece that is the first thing to go. So before anything is sold, we sit down with you and record it: how it started, what the best of it was, the piece that got away. That story stays on every object with the collector's name, and goes with it to whoever keeps it next. You get a page where you can see where each piece ended up.

Three ways the story gets recorded

On camera, where it lives. We travel to the collection and film it properly: you talking about how it started, the room and the shelves as they are, the objects in your hands. Wherever in the world the collection happens to be.

On a call. If the collection is sent to us rather than collected, we have the same conversation over a video call and write it up, with one photograph of the shelf as it stood.

In writing. If you would rather not talk at all, answer a handful of questions in your own time and in your own words. It goes on the objects exactly as you wrote it.

It never changes anything else, and you can always say no to it. Some conversations run ten minutes, some an afternoon. Read the collections we have taken on

One piece, or all of it.

A whole collection: tell us what is in it and the person who would come replies within two days, with one price for all of it. A single piece: send a photograph and see what we pay. Either way we pay in your own currency, and shipping to us is free.