There is a big box of boxes of slides at my Dad’s house.
I will be looking to find some pics for his memorial do, but also I have a feeling that there will be loads of stuff that will just disappear and I would like to get them scanned so I can go through them and possibly host them somewhere, so my cousins have a look and download whatever they want.
My Dad took pics at nearly all major family events so it is quite an archive, although he isn’t in many of them!
He was useless at keeping records, none of the boxes are labelled.
I could buy a viewer and start going through them but I was wondering if any one had tried scanning slides themselves and what that might entail or if anyone has used a commercial scanning service and might care to share their experience!
I have a Plustek 8100 scanner, which scans 35mm Negative and Colour Slides individually.
Its pretty good although the supplied software is slow, and it can take quite a while to do high res scans.
When I was last shooting 35mm film, I found it easier to get it developed and a low res ‘contact’ scan done (good enough for PC viewing/Facebook etc), then do my own high res ones for particular photos I wanted.
If you have the time then I would say do it yourself, its quite fun and can be a nice family thing to go through them.
Plustek for me too. I agree with ‘hoops’ time scale comments. I spent dark nights over a couple of winters scanning my slides and now I enjoy looking at stuff I hadn’t seen for 30 years.
Are you using VueScan?
I have a suggestion. Given that there may be lots of near duplicates and perhaps some dross.
How about buying yourself a small light box and lupe (unless your dad had one already) to help with an initial cull before the hassle of scanning.
I don’t think he had anything like that and I am not sure I know what you mean, have you got a link to an example? I have tried googling ‘lightbox and lupe’ and haven’t really got anywhere.
A light box is just a backlight for the slide and a loupe is a strong magnifying glass to have a look.
I suspect to view the slide before deciding if it is worth enlarging?
I get that, but I may as well just get a cheap viewer, but they take time loading each slide indivudually, there are loads of boxes
just googled and found this which might work
You can try a normal scanner to get them into a computer
We got a £40 thing from 7 day shop that does 4 at a time
The results weren’t too bad
The viewer above will be very slow to check over slides ( I used to have 1000s of slides )
If you have an A4 light box and a lupe you can put 20 slides on the lightbox at one time
That may well help enough to see whats what - but a lupe will allow a x10 look at the detail for those of more interest and can be used in conjunction with the lightbox
Perfect, have ordered the light box and a loupe to get me started.
Once I have an idea of the size of the task for scanning I can work out what I need.
I had an Epson V750 (Well, still do, in Florida), does about 12 slides at once. Here I have an old Minolta. Plenty on E-bay.
Had a quick look online, and it seems you can get batches scanned for quite reasonable rates now. Think I might go that way if/when I get around to sorting the best from the thousands that I have. I did some with an old Minolta Dimage scanner years ago and it was a bit of a pain.