Is there a standard metadata field for the film frame number?

And - at the risk of this sounding like a sales pitch - maybe also look at my Search Replace Transfer which shoves metadata from one field to another.

Hi,

If a film has been commercially mounted then often the mounts have a slide number and month+year stamp on them. But sometimes commercial ones don't have the slide number or date. Ones I mounted myself do not have the info - for some reason we didn't think it was necessary 40 years ago!

The problem I'm facing is that I digitized my slides in what I thought was the correct order for each roll. But now checking through I find that many of those without numbers have become shuffled, sometimes even between film rolls. So they are out of order and the 'story' doesn't make sense.

The solution is to open the mounts and find the frame numbers on the film itself. When I find duplicate frame numbers then I know that slides have migrated into the wrong box. 

The sort of things I can do to work out where mis-sorts should go is to look at the flim makers name and type on the top of the slides. This repeats in a regular pattern so you can tell when a slide is in the right roll. As many of ours were hand cut with scisors the cut lines are not perfectly straight. I can use that to match slides as well.

Once I have the correct order for the slides then I need to get the digitzed copies back into order. Which is where adding a frame number can help. And I am adding roughly correct timestamps so that the slides show in chronological order when viewed in Lightroom or as exports to my NAS.

I tried various scanners but they were all painfully slow. Using the Nikon Z7 setup, I can digitze about 2 to 3 slides per minute.

Thanks for confirming that there isn't a standard field. I'm always supprised at how often something I think should be easy turns out to be really hard. But then I suppose there are so many different people using Lightroom in so many different ways that there are always going to be gaps! 😞

Go to View --> View Options and click on any of the drop downs in the Compact or Extended Cells Extras sections.  That will give you a list of fields LrC will display in those cells.  There's no "film frame number", so you'd need to repurpose something else that's listed there if you want that data to be visible in the cells.

I did something similar using Caption for the slide group/container and Title for the frame number that was printed on the slide.  You still can't sort by those, but it allowed a lot of other things to be done that helped with the organization.  For example, I was then able to use those fields in my file naming template, so now sorting by file name effectively gives me the original slide order, but I can still set capture dates independently and use keywords and collections to organize in other ways.  It's not the most elegant, but it's worked well for me.

Another thing worth looking at is John Ellis' Any Filter plug in - https://johnrellis.com/lightroom/anyfilter.htm.  That  can be a big help when you're using metadata that's outside of what LrC is providing access to natively.