Archiving Old Photos

[pbbeck]

I was back in Boston last weekend, helping my mother to clean out my father's old study. He passed away in 2003, and only now has my mother begun to tackle cleaning out this particular room in the house. My father was a physician, a professor of medicine at Harvard, and a preeminent researcher in biochemistry. He wrote the book.... literally. Digging my way through his study, I made it into a closet where I found an estimated 12,000 - 14, 000 Kodachrome slides dating back to 1947. I also found some great old cameras . a Leica M3, an early '60s Polaroid with a Rodenstock-Ysarex lens,a Hasselbad something-or-other and several early Canon SLRs.

 

I want to digitize these slides I found and was wondering if anyone here has done this before. It's apparently very expensive scanning slides. Paying to have them scanned can cost from $.34 - $2/slide. Alternately, I could buy a slide scanner, but I have no idea how to choose one.

 

Any thoughts?

 

[David]

Try the Epson V600. You can do several at a time. I just used it to digitize a bunch of amazing slides/prints from three generations ago. I was very happy with the results.

[Mrs. Caddis]

Glad you brought the subject up. I have been thinking of doing this also. Remember to make sure you have enough memory storage. Does anyone have a idea how much space you would need per slide? I'm thinking I will need a separate external drive when I actually get around to scanning our slides.

[David]

The space is a function of resolution--I ended up at about 5MB/slide.

[pbbeck]

Space is not an issue for me... I have 4TB of storage on my home computer. My photo library as it is has about 20,000 images at 125GB. It's amazing how inexpensive hard drives have become.

[artig]

I have a Canon CanoScan 8800F which will scan 4 slides at a time. The quality is good, but it's not exactly fast. I've scanned about 400 slides, and would hate to think how grey-haired I'd be by the time I'd scanned 14,000 slides.

 

[CarrotNC]

Assuming the slides are work related, is there any chance you could donate the collection to Harvard with the stipulation that they scan the images into a digital format and make the files available for free? They've got the hardware and the student interns available....

[Selden]

If you really want to digitize 14,000 slides, I would recommend a dedicated slide scanner, which operates at far higher resolution than a flat bed scanner. Fortunately, your father shot in Kodachrome, which is possibly the most stable color slide film ever made. If he had used Ektachrome, no matter how good the storage conditions, you would have 14,000 badly faded slides to deal with.

 

Slide Scanner Reviews

[Albert]

I recently purchased a used CanoScan 8800F for scanning my personal slides. As said, it does 4 at a time. Each set of 4 takes around 2 minutes to scan. If you actually want to scan 14,000 slides this may not be the best option. You may want to invest in a cheap slide sorter and do a preliminary pass through the slides. You may find (as I did) there were far fewer slides I actually wanted to keep than I had.

[Lynn]

Mark has a Minolta IV scanner (a rather old one) and is now into the year 2000 of scanning all of his slides (he shot slides for about 25 years-from age 10 to about 5-7 years ago).

 

I will second the recommendation that, if you are going to do it yourself, get a dedicated slide scanner. Mark's is pretty old, but it is far easier to use and does a better job than the film scanner on our flatbed scanner.

 

One important thing is to be sure you identify the slides as you put them in. It will help immensely in sorting and filing the slides. Mark learned this one after getting his first tray done. :> You definitely want to be able to sort your slides and get them into some semblance of order (albums/folders/whatever your software does) as you go.

 

 

[pbbeck]

Thanks for all your feedback. The more I talk about, research, and read about slide scanning, the more convinced I am of finding a lab to do it for me. David... the Epson you recommend looks like a great machine. A web search led me to this article. They liked the scanner but emphasize the general impracticality of flatbed slide scanners. They adamantly urge the reader to have slides scanned at a lab.

 

I like the idea of getting the university to scan them. Quite a lot of the slides are work related. This is good because I have no interest in scanning them, but it still leaves me with about 5-6000 personal slides to deal with.

[David]

If I were you and couldn't get the university to scan them, I'd buy a nice light table, choose several hundred representative slides, and then have them done professionally.

[markgoodrich]

I've been putting this same project (much smaller number of slides) off for years. Aside from 'which scanner' or 'pay someone', my other question is 'what about dirt and dust on the slides?' Even stored in trays in boxes, stuff gets on the slides, stuff that sometimes does NOT want to come off easily.

 

So, aside from slide poop, IS there a best-price place to send them?

[Lets_Play_Two]

I have been working on and off for 6 years scanning photos on a flat bed so I can give my children DVDs with pictures of them growing up and of their mother who died in 2001. I am using an Epson V700 for the prints currently after using a Canon. I have no idea how many prints I have scanned but I am finally getting close to the digital age and simply need to do editing of those pictures. This is not a fast process at all!!! You can simply sort them in some fashion and have them scanned by a lab. There are labs that send you a box for a flat fee and will scan as many as you get in the box. They do no sorting or turning or grouping that you have not already done.

 

I don't intend to use it for the slides which I have been going through as David mentioned on a lightbox doing a thorough editing job. The slides I keep will get done by a lab.

[Deadboy]

http://www.woot.com/

[Gregori]

Today is a woot-off, so whatever you linked to is looooong gone...