My parents have quite a few old slides of photos they took when I was growing up in the 80s. I’d like to scan them and label, and then print out some photo books so our family can enjoy them. I am not digital photo savvy – any suggestions for how to approach this project? Thanks!
Send them to costco, easiest. They give you a DVD. Then you copy from the DVD to make photo books.
Not that expensive and really worth the NO hassle.
Depending on how many slides you have, how much you want to spend, and how much time you have, you can either pay a service to convert them, or purchase a device that converts slides to digital images and do it yourself manually.
I have a slide converter but there are flat bed scanners that also do slides.
I’ve just never trusted letting old family slides go to an outside source.
We used https://www.scancafe.com/ several years ago, happy with the quality. A scanning service has better quality equipment than you can afford as well as software to help them adjust the color, remove some scratches, etc.
scancafe periodically has sales. They are having one now, and no doubt will have them again in the future. In the past a friend used a count of their photos to purchase the service and then sent in the photos a few weeks later, I don’t know if you can still do that to take advantage of sales before you’re ready to pack and send them in.
That looks like a great service, @mikemac. I just bookmarked their site. I have a basement full of photographs that I don’t know what to do with.
One other suggestion for when you get them digitized is to use them as the backdrop on your PC. We have our set up this way on our windows machines and it is easy to do. Probably easy on a Mac too. We had boxes and boxes of photos that we never looked at, but with the computer showing a new one every 15 minutes we’re seeing pictures that we haven’t looked at in years.
@gouf78 What brand of slide converter do you have? Looks like there are many different types available online. I am having trouble with the idea of sending them to a service… I’m sure they’re trustworthy, but would like to learn more about doing them myself.
Thanks to all who have responded with suggestions!
To tell the truth mine is so old that I couldn’t recommend it. Sure there are a lot of good and better options.
Look on-line for suggestions and go to B&H photo–they carry just about everything at decent prices.
I did about 9,000 of my folks slides with a digital interface doohickey. You put three slides in, click, move, click, move. When the memory card fills, I downloaded to an external hard drive. Yes, it took a whole summer, but it wasn’t hard. The slide interface was purchased from amazon, but you can get them from photo stores too.
I made a folder for each slide tray, and labelled each file with whatever was written on the box or the slide itself. Copied all the folders onto discs, printed an index, handed them out. Now, I would rpobably just put them on memory sticks.
Made a set of Shutterfly books of the best photos for my parents. It was a long term project, but I couldn’t chance a service with the slides. Just cleaned them lightly, (but I have a background in that) .