1000's of slides... What should I do?

[Caladin2]

I have inherited over 1000 slide from my grandparents trips around the world. I would like to get them all converted to a digital format so i can have them on my PC and post them to my online photo hosting site. Is there a company that will do this for a reasonable price?

 

[rootaxs]

There are a lot of places that'll do it for you. Just search for "slide to digital". It's been a while since i've done it, but we had about 5k negatives and slides to convert and the rate we got then was $0.35/slide. At that rate, it was cheaper for us to just get this and do it in-house.

http://ca.konicaminolta.com/products/consumer/digital_camera/dimage/dimagescan-elite5400/index.html

 

[Caladin2]

TY! Seems that model was discontinued. Does anyone have any recommendation for a current model. Most of the pictures are landscapes pictures vs people. I want to get the best quality without paying $$$ if possible.

 

[Munky]

Get a projector and enjoy the original quality.

 

[LR6]

I did this, almost 2000 of them.

This will not get you the "best" quality possible, but it will give you "good" quality. You will pay for the "best" quality. I think that this is the best low cost method.

First I bought a Canon flatbed scanner that came with a transparency adapter. 8400F I think. I also bought a cheap slide viewer from a local photo supply store so that I can only scan in the ones that I wanted.

I used IrfanView to scan the slides in, it auto saved the files and incremented the files names, this will make things go much quicker.

I then went through a few carousels a night until I was done.

Some things that I learned along the way:
1. disable most of the auto-correct crap in the scanner interface.
2. Start with a new "base" part of the filename for each set of slides. I stated off putting each carousel in it own directory, but now I probably have 20 scanimage001.jpg files in different directories. The date stamped on each slide works well for this.
3. Only scan the most important slides at the highest resolution.

Also, If I was doing this over I would look into something like silverfast to see if I could get better quality.

 

[BeauJangles]

I want to get the best quality without paying $$$ if possible.

You're gonna pay for the best quality. You need to determine what is acceptable quality and go from there.

 

[randomlinh]

scancafe does it for .29/slide. Which can definitely get expensive, but keep in mind this will be a time consuming task.

Though, if you scan yourself, you can organize it while you do it. Or, if you have kids, then now have a new job =) Also, look at the used market.

Personally, at thousands to do, I'd just have someone else do it for me. My Scan Dual III takes anywhere from 45-60 seconds a scan at high quality.

 

[corkyg]

I went through all of this a few years ago when cleaning out my wife's parent's estate. Her father took color slides for years, and I had to go through about 50 Kodak carousels full. I used a projector and unless the slide involved family members, I simply pitched it. Net result - only about 100 or so slides to convert out of 1000s. Pictures of places and scenes of travels are a dime a dozen and generally not worth saving. nStep 1 is triage.

 

[randomlinh]

I went through all of this a few years ago when cleaning out my wife's parent's estate. Her father took color slides for years, and I had to go through about 50 Kodak carousels full. I used a projector and unless the slide involved family members, I simply pitched it. Net result - only about 100 or so slides to convert out of 1000s. Pictures of places and scenes of travels are a dime a dozen and generally not worth saving. nStep 1 is triage.

tis also a good point. If anything, keep a few of the places and scenes. I recently went through some old photos of my own.. and paired down what I wanted to keep even further.