A question about silver

[Badger Mountain Charlie SASS #43172]

I am in the process of going through 90+years of old photographs. A lot of people I don't know and a lot of landscape. 

Trying to play the game and wondering if this needs to be recycled to extraxt the silver from the photographs. I heard a rumor 

that there was silver that could be extracted. Where am I wrong?

[Alpo]

You can extract silver from negatives, and you can extract silver from the fixer solution when you are developing the film, but I don't think there's any silver involved in making prints.

 

But then all of my film processing experience has been simply making the negatives. I was in the X-ray business. Never made prints.

[Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984]

Could be. In the late 70s I was involved in computerizing many newspapers. Converting from hot metal to phototypesetting.  There was big money in silver reclamation. But they had a heck of a lot of paper every day.

 

there was a lot more silver in the film than the photographs.

 

this site describes the process of reclaiming silver from film

https://www.911metallurgist.com/blog/recovering-silver-from-photographic-materials
it sounds like something you don’t want to do. You might have to have many thousands of old photos to have something of value in silver.

 

if you run into a cache of old polaroids (many many) you might have something.

 

This is a site with a “contact us”.

[Badger Mountain Charlie SASS #43172]

Thanks guys. I knew my information was flawed.