Digitizing Photos and Slides

Joined
Dec 31, 2017
Messages
15,069
Location
SE British Columbia, Canada
I have a ton of old photos and slides that are put way more or less in a chronological order. What ideas do you have to digitize them? Did you give them to a professional service, or buy a digitizer or just photograph them with your smart phone. I need to downsize all those boxes. Any ideas are most welcome. Thanks.
 
Taking photos with smartphone = fast, but dubious quality; and may be difficult to organize with file names, dates and descriptions in the EXIF meta info
Buying a cheap-but-likely-surprisingly-good scanner = slow, high quality and you'll still have to name them and add EXIF data with an application; but at least the image is already on your computer :^)

A service provider might be able to get them digitized for you at a substantial cost and the images will still be named incoherently and with no descriptive data in the file. If you scan them, you'll have the opportunity to see them all again and you'll be able to catalogue them in some way.

Doing this exact thing has been on my "to do this summer" list for about 15 years. :^)
 
It's a thankless task and with zero eventual value. I have a few photographs I wanted to do since 2001. It will never be done.
 
If you have a digital SLR there are several Youtube videos on converting slide projectors into slide copiers. There are more details involved but the basic principle is you remove the projector lens so the projector projects the image directly into the camera lens. It is a bit of a project but if you have a lot of slides and some time it works OK.

For copying prints and negatives I just used a flatbed scanner. Very slow process but very good results.
 
About 40 years ago, I started genealogy notebooks on all the men in my family with my last name back six generations and also for my son and two grandsons. I place any photos that are good in there, letters, poetry written by my great grandfather (I have the originals) etc. I have my dad's WWII service records and some photos. I have, where I can get them, death certificates, birth data (old Bible pages, etc). I find this is much nicer than just photos. Everything is labeled and tells the story of each person from birth through death. It is good to do this while older family members are alive and have stuff they can give you and identify! My notebooks take up about six feet of shelf space now and I will pass them on to my son after I am gone.

It is fun to do one on yourself. Makes you think about who you are and what you want to tell people about yourself if the book survives 100 years or so.
 
I'm in the same pickle.

I intend to get a good slide/negative scanner from circa 2000 on ebay, do what I need, then resell it on ebay for about what I paid. "Good" being several hundred bucks and well regarded at the time.

There are some dreadful ones sold new for a price point, under $100.

My color prints use dyes that aren't exactly in line with the color receptors of my scanner or DSLR. So the results are sub-par. If I could scan the negatives (which I held on to!) that's a generation better in quality.

It's a good project to do, as fungi gets into the emulsion. Save the slides if at all possible, in deep storage, in case a better technology comes along later.
 
Originally Posted by eljefino
I'm in the same pickle.
I intend to get a good slide/negative scanner from circa 2000 on ebay, do what I need, then resell it on ebay for about what I paid. "Good" being several hundred bucks and well regarded at the time.


Make double, triple and quadruple sure that thing'll be supported by whatever OS you're running now, which couldn't have been dreamed of in 2000.
If your Windows or MacOS machine doesn't support it, it might be worth a look-see if any Linux distributions of legacy kernels would: You'd be able to likely run it from a USB drive solely to run the scanner.
 
I am in the middle of a similar project right now. I am also scanning my deceased fathers collection of a few thousand 35mm slides. I elected to do it myself instead of sending to a professional service for the primary reason that I felt a significant number of slides were not worth scanning and I didn't want incur the time consuming task of selecting which slides I wanted to send and then have to sort and categorize when returned. I find that I'm really only interested in savings pictures that contain images of family and friends. My dad was a fantastic photographer who always owned good gear, but, I'm really not that interested in pictures of famous places he visited on vacation. If I want to see a picture of the Eiffel tower I can find many choices on my computer in two seconds.

Your choice of scanner depends on a few factors. What type of quality do you want? How fast do you want to process them. How much image correction do you want to do while scanning. How much do you want to spend. I chose the Epson V600 scanner. It's geared toward scanning photographs in negative/slide/print format but is basically a flatbed scanner as opposed to dedicated slide or negative scanners. So far I've done mostly slides. You can do four at a time with this scanner.

I made my decision based on the review written for this scanner by one person on Amazon.com. If you search for Epson V600 on Amazon and then click on the ratings the first one when sorted by "top reviews" will be from M1K3 from D3troit. It's the most informative review I've ever read on Amazon and gives great detail on the methodology he used to scan 5,400 slide with the V600.

I have removed greater than 50% of the slides by giving them a quick review by holding it in front a light source. Scanning at higher resolution is a slow process, but, as the review said. if you get into a rhythm, naming and sorting the images created while a new batch is being scanned, it goes surprisingly quickly. I named the files with year-names of people in pic-location/description.

I'm very happy with the results. The color correction for old color shifted slides is fantastic! READ that review on Amazon and if you decide to buy it, save that review to a file for set up information in case the review is removed for some reason. Don't buy the scanner on Amazon. it's way overpriced there. I bought a refurbished unit from Adorama for $160 and it has been flawless.

Oh, and as suggested by that review, save the image files created on at least two different devices. I have mine stored on the computer disk drive and an external USB drive. My computer files are also synced with one drive to the cloud.

Although time consuming, it really is fun to review these old pics. I wish I had done this while my dad was alive so he could give the background on some of the pics or tell me who some of the people are. I've scanned about 400 from the 1956-1960 time frame and the quality of those old Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides is impressive. One positive aspect of this quarantine, it gave me the time to get started on this project. Good luck on your project!
 
I bought an Ion pics 2 SD about 10 years ago. Its been great I had 10,000 slides and did like 2000+ some special slides I had professionally done. It does pics and slides.
Amazon has cheaper ones now. Just make sure it does slides and pics. $350 is still a good deal. Even 10 years ago slides were a buck a piece.

Here is an example of one I did myself. Now I had a good 35slr camera. New wife new 69 Camaro.
[Linked Image from i.postimg.cc]
 
Back
Top