what to do with 35mm slides!

[albireo13]

I have boxes full of old family pictures in 35mm slides.
I used to have a carousel slide projector but that died years ago.
Now I need to do something with them. There are likely good
momento pics in there.
What do folks do with piles of old pics and slides??

 

[pacergal]

My brother is holding boxes of the same from my parents and grandparents. Siblings and I have been meaning to get together and go through them. Ones we want to keep can be made into pictures or somehow we will get help digitizing them. Others will just be tossed.
He has close to 100 boxes. It feels a bit overwhelming, thus, we still have not gotten to it!
After my last parent died, we did go through all of the pictures and kept the ones we wanted.
Three large yard bags of old pictures. school books, report cards went to the dump

 

[mpeirce]

You can either scan them yourselves or have someone do it for you.

Scanning yourself takes a lot of time, while sending them out costs.

Scanmyphotos.com does a pretty good job in my experience.

 

[albireo13]

My brother is holding boxes of the same from my parents and grandparents. Siblings and I have been meaning to get together and go through them. Ones we want to keep can be made into pictures or somehow we will get help digitizing them. Others will just be tossed.
He has close to 100 boxes. It feels a bit overwhelming, thus, we still have not gotten to it!
After my last parent died, we did go through all of the pictures and kept the ones we wanted.
Three large yard bags of old pictures. school books, report cards went to the dump

I am in the same boat. My two parents passed away last year and we cleaned out their apartment storage and there were a tone of old 35mm slides and prints. Photography was my Dad's hobby and he kept everything.

I have boxes of their old pics in my basement. I have two sibs but, we live in different states so, it's hard to go through these together.

I am thinking of getting a decent slide scanner and crunch through it myself. It will take days for sure. Ugh!

Paying to have it all done will be costly. I can thin out bad pics myself before scanning.

Seems like a lot of folks have dealt with similar situations.

 

[friar1610]

I have boxes full of old family pictures in 35mm slides.
I used to have a carousel slide projector but that died years ago.
Now I need to do something with them. There are likely good
momento pics in there.
What do folks do with piles of old pics and slides??

Quite a few years ago I had a large number of 35 mm slides converted to “pictures” which I received on a disk. (You can tell I’m no techie because I don’t know the correct terminology or the format.) This was done at a photography store that was having a sale. Don’t recall what I paid. Then I uploaded them to the I-photo program on my Mac. I’ve also scanned a number of old snapshots on my printer/scanner/fax machine and similarly uploaded them. The scanned snapshots came out better than I expected. It’s a good snowy day activity.

Our daughters gave us an Aura Frame a few years ago and we have quite a few old pix being constantly displayed on it.

 

[RunningBum]

I second scanmyphotos.com. A couple years ago they were doing Groupon deals.

 

[steelyman]

I’m going to check out scanmyphotos, thanks for the recommendation.

I’ve started the process of scanning printed photos on my flatbed scanner and got about 3/4 of the way through before the boredom factor kicked in and I hit pause.

But a sibling sent me a box of slides that I haven’t dealt with. I don’t know what they are or their ages so this may solve that problem.

 

[Z3Dreamer]

Advice from DW. Cull out duplicates or bad shots. Clean is step two, using a commercial cleaner purchased from Amazon. Scanning is next step. Do it yourself or many services available. Most old photos need to have things fixed. To do this, free Gimp software will do most. Or Adobe LightRoom. Half an hour on each picture to remove blobs, lighten them up, fix horizons, adjust colors, etc. DW did about 500 photos.

Gimp has a lot of instructional videos on youtube.

Now, you have something to do on those long winter days.

 

[Aerides]

My parents went thru all their old slides and had them digitized by a local photo studio. They were then able to organize and prioritize, and give thumb drives to my sister and I a few years back, so we all have the archive.

 

[walkinwood]

First step is to go through them and cull out the duplicates, badly shot/exposed/focused ones.



You can get an inexpensive slide viewer and get started on this. In my opinion, this is the most important step because it will save you time/effort/money down the line.


Next - decide if you want to spend the time to scan the slides. It is tedious work & you'll need to buy a scanner that can handle slides. How good a scanner depends on what you want to do with the scans. There is also a learning curve, so this is a project - a tedious one at that.



Or outsource the scanning. Costs money, but you're not tied to a scanner for hours.


I did a lot of scanning of photographs/slides during the early days of the pandemic last year. Photography is my hobby and while I wouldn't say I enjoyed this task, it was okay. I did it over weeks - a few hours here & there. I have no intention of printing the scans.


The payoff - besides my own enjoyment - was sharing the pictures with the people whose family were in the images. So many people got something out of the effort.


Good luck.

 

[Amethyst]

I threw most of them away and had the best ones printed on photo paper to keep. It's amazing how few of these snapshots hold up. Trip photos? Everyone's been to the exact same landmarks. Family shots? A select few will grab you; the rest are meh. And does anybody really care what car somebody bought in 1959?

I have boxes full of old family pictures in 35mm slides.
I used to have a carousel slide projector but that died years ago.
Now I need to do something with them. There are likely good
momento pics in there.
What do folks do with piles of old pics and slides??

 

[Amethyst]

We didn't have anything like that many, but most were so boring it felt like that many.

How I approach a task where I don't know where to start, is to start anywhere. It soon becomes apparent whether it's worth doing the whole thing.

My brother is holding boxes of the same from my parents and grandparents. Siblings and I have been meaning to get together and go through them. Ones we want to keep can be made into pictures or somehow we will get help digitizing them. Others will just be tossed.
He has close to 100 boxes. It feels a bit overwhelming, thus, we still have not gotten to it!

 

[cathy63]

I just finished a scanning project, and it really doesn't take that long. I did it while watching TV or listening to podcasts. I bought a Kodak Scanza that allows continuous feeding of the slides and the capture is pretty quick. https://www.amazon.com/KODAK-SCANZA-Digital-Slide-Scanner/dp/B00O2BU8PK

After I scanned them all, I uploaded them to Amazon (unlimited storage with Prime). Their algorithm automatically groups all the photos with the same person together into albums, so it's easy to share the links with other family members.

 

[mpeirce]

Trip photos? Everyone's been to the exact same landmarks. Family shots? A select few will grab you; the rest are meh. And does anybody really care what car somebody bought in 1959?

We’ve been digitizing family photo collections for years now. We focus on the people. That’s really all that’s worth bothering with.

It has informed my photo taking. I really enjoy taking photos of nature, vistas, sunrises/sunsets and so on, but I now take care to make sure I get more people shots every chance I can.

 

[Kwirk]

I bought an Epson scanner that captured 4 slides at a time. Each day for weeks I would scan the contents of one or two carousels. It seemed to take forever but eventually I finished and trashed the originals. The scanner has now passed on to another family member for their scanning project.

I found it easier to sort and winnow after scanning, probably because I no longer had a working projector. I keep back up copies of the collection on a usb drive, Microsoft One Drive, and various computers/phones.

Our best use for the scanned slides has been a daily slide show with morning coffee. They're also great for conversation when shown in the background during family visits.

 

[Sunset]

There was recently a thread about this, with great detail on doing 5,500 slides, and the pretty good solution:

https://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f54/macro-and-camera-for-slides-111031-2.html#post2673875

 

[Lewis Clark]

Check with your public library system. Ours has a program that will digitize most anything (slides, photos, record albums, VCR tapes, etc.) for free.

 

[aja8888]

After my last parent died, we did go through all of the pictures and kept the ones we wanted.
Three large yard bags of old pictures. school books, report cards went to the dump

I'm going through the same exercise for my daughter before I "move on". I guess maybe my sophomore report card from 1958 will not be of interest to her?

 

[JT90505]

I scanned all the old pictures (>100 years worth) and slides myself. It took months but 1) Time is not exactly an issue, and 2) it would have been quite expensive to pay someone to do it. Another advantage of doing it yourself (for me anyway) is that I was organizing the pictures as I scanned them. The thought of receiving a folder of thousands of unsorted images would not have appealed to me.

I view it as one of the best uses of my time during retirement. I use the old photos as computer wallpaper, and its become something of a hobby going through the images removing undesirables, improving crops, and generally improving image quality using photoshop elements.

My suggestion would be to digitize using whatever method makes sense for you, get them organized, and have fun!

 

[martyp]

I digitized my slides and photos maybe 15 years ago. I did a lot of amateur photography during the film days so I had a LOT of slides. I was an early adopter to digital photography and know a lot about imaging, image files, and bought into one of the first versions of Photoshop. I bought a really good flat bed scanner. I remember dedicating 30 min to an hour each night after work just feeding photos and slides through it. I got through my photos in a couple of months. At one point I selected some of my best "artistic" photos and had them digitized at a photo shop at much higher resolution.

Digitizing slides is just like cleaning out a bunch of stuff in the garage. You have the piles of keep, throw away, and maybe. Then go through the maybe pile and get rid of most of that. Also, note that the more images you keep the more you have to organize the computer files. And you should keep multiple copies of the files. Keep some at home on a disk. Some in cloud storage. Finally, realize that there is little point in keeping anything if you can't see it or interact with it. I recommend getting a digital picture frame. I have hundreds of photos that change every hour on the frame.

Four years ago I moved to Thailand and reduced my possessions to two suitcases and a few boxes. It is a good thing that I sorted through my photos years ago and that they are easily accessible today.

 

[Jerry1]

I bought an Epson scanner that captured 4 slides at a time. Each day for weeks I would scan the contents of one or two carousels. It seemed to take forever but eventually I finished and trashed the originals.

DW is the picture librarian. She did the same as above. Four at a time but eventually it got done. One difference - DW would never trash originals.

Having them in digital format is the way to go unless you’re going to be brutal with culling through the slides and only keeping the few that have meaning to you.

 

[Retiired]

Donate old slides?

If your first inclination is to throw old slides out, either after digitizing, or just because they are no longer wanted, you may want to consider instead donating them to Goodwill or The Salvation Army. You would be amazed at how much they can get for old slides! I have seen some lots of slides sell for hundreds of dollars!

 

[sengsational]

I trashed the many thousands of slides I scanned. I used the same scanner as Cathy (Scanza); after comparing the quality of some test scans that I did on the flatbed scanner, I decided the quick scanner was good enough. This was based on:

• nobody is going to print any of these
• they will probably be viewed at 1080 x 1920
• the underlying photography isn't that great

As to culling, yes, if you're going to pay to have them scanned. And yes, if your scan takes a long time. But I was doing 300 per hour, and scanned everything. It was easier to have a no-decision repetitive process. Once digitized, it's much easier to click through and take action (i.e. delete).

I agree that this thread has a lot of good information. My first thought was a digital camera and a macro lens, but, as I mentioned, the Scanza was good enough. BTW, an update: I mailed the Scanza to my cousin, who's dad was an avid photographer and she's going to scan the archive she acquired.

There was recently a thread about this, with great detail on doing 5,500 slides, and the pretty good solution:

https://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f54/macro-and-camera-for-slides-111031-2.html#post2673875

 

[mpeirce]

If you are previewing slides, a slide viewer like the following is really useful:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000AE6G9

 

[sengsational]

^The huge pile of slides I acquired had one of those, but I didn't use it because the dedicated scanner had a nice screen that was updated in real-time.