Advice to convert slides to digital?

There are devices available for doing such conversions. I have seen them range in price from about $30 to around $100, depending on the features you want. Talk to a camera store or look online for them. In the past, I have also seen them for sale at Sam's Club.

Karen, There are a few options you can consider. > Take the slides to a Conversion Service and have them do the work. There are services of that type in most cities. For a large number of slides, this will probably NOT be the most cost effective option. > Use a small dedicated Slide Converter. These are usually fairly simple to operate, but may not provide the same high quality resolution as some other methods. > Use a Flatbed Scanner, such as those made by Epson. These often have a plastic "Adapter" to hold a number of slides during the scanning process. These are also capable of scanning negatives or prints. One point to keep in mind is that scanning photos often creates fairly large file sizes, although that can be defined to some extent in the setup. For some examples of products, have a look at www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_26?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=slide+to+digital+converter&x=0&y=0&sprefix=slide+to+digital+converter Good luck!

If you decide to buy a converter and do it yourself, this advice is unnecessary, but if you decide to take your slides to an outside service and you still own a slide projector, you might want to choose which slides you transfer in advance. If you have the time, that is. I started looking at my slides of Russia from the late 1980s/early 90s before converting them. What I realized is that I took way too many shots of the same things or had pictures of things that no longer had any meaning to me. After I had weeded out the ones I knew I'd never look at again, I discovered that only about 50% of the slides really needed to be converted. If you're paying by quantity, that makes a difference. EDIT: First paragraph wording was changed because this site won't allow me to submit the word P R E S E L E C T. Weird.

I took mine to Costco. They have the service there. You do pay per slide. My slides were from the mid 70's and had started to fade, not entirely happy with the results of the conversion, but at least I now have all those travel photos in my iPhoto on my computer and can enjoy them anytime instead of pulling out the slide projector, etc.

Thanks all, will look into. If nothing else it will give my Dad something to do. I didn't even think of Costco. I have about 20 Carousels of slides that I'll test out first. Question is..... where is my slide projector??? Matt, Good advice on the prescreening. There are probably thousands of duplicate birthday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas pictures year after year. And it will give my Dad something to do. Maybe looking at the travel pictures will give him the idea of going on another trip to Europe.

Hope this doesn't violate the no advertising policy and it doesn't directly answer the question but does solve one of my big problems. Today, Groupon is offering a deal on converting 1000, 4x6 photos, to a DVD for $29 unbelievable price. Go to - http://www.groupon.com/deals/scanmyphotos-new-york?utm_campaign=UserReferral&utm_medium=ApiV2&utm_source=uu1898050

There are slide scanners you can buy that come with basic image-editing software.

I had hundreds of slides from my year in Vietnam as did many of my buddies. These were taken in the 60's and I have scanned them on my Epson Scanner and can do four at a time. It does take some time but take an hour or so a day and before you know it they would all be on your computer for storage or prints. A number of my slides had deterioated and had blue spots on them and from what I have heard that is not an uncommon problem for slides. Your Dad's may not have shown a degrading of his slides as some of mine did but whether he does it on a personal scanner or gets and outside service to do it I would get him to have them converted just as soon as he can. So much more convenient for viewing and you can back them up in numerous ways.

http://www.homemoviedepot.com/ I went through this same issue a few years ago. I looked at machines to do it myself, I looked at local (to me) services for conversion, and I looked at various services on the net. Doing it yourself can work, but it is extremely time consuming and the hardware isn't cheap. Slides need to be handled one at a time or in stacks. They will jam, so it is tough to just start up the process and leave it all day. In addition, there is a fairly large amount of time per slide dedicated to ICE cleanup. I decided the whole process wasn't worth it because I had thousands of slides to deal with. Many of the services you find on the net have your slides go off to China or some other country where the labor intensive process costs less. I don't know how to filter these out except to read reviews and compare costs. If the price seems abnormally low compared to other services, then it is almost certainly being shipped overseas. Generally, you are also told it will take a month or more to get your originals back. I was not comfortable sending all my originals overseas. Finally, a lead led me to Home Movie Depot. Imagine my surprise when I found out they were fifteen minutes away from my parents house back in Missouri. Needless to say, these are the folks I tried and was quite pleased. They aren't the cheapest, but we've converted over 10,000 slides from 1950s vintage to 1980s. We've also done 8mm film, 8mm and miniDV videotapes to DVD. My suggestion is to make a box of samples and do a test run with them. I'll detail in the next post.

For your samples, pick one or more slides from your slides. I used some heavily damaged ones as well as a few from more recent decades. I did some at high-res, but I don't think it was worth it, so the remaining slides I just did at normal resolution. I took a digital picture of the entire pile I sent off. I also took digital pictures of key slides. Put them on a light table or against a window. When you do boxes of slides, this will help you keep track of the development date for each box. If you have a large number of slides it is probably best to send off sets separately rather than everything at once. No sense in risking all the originals in a single shipment. You will end up spending considerable amounts of time organizing the digital photos. I have not done any negatives or printed photo conversions, but I might try some negative strips later this year.

Frank, thanks for the Groupon tip! Hadn't even thought about the photo albums. I have more than a dozen albums that I can convert to digital . Have no idea how many photos, but since I only had 10 minutes to figure out before the Groupon expired, I went for 2000. They also convert slides... expensive, but if my Dad can edit out the duplicates and poor quality pictures, my brothers and I can buy the service and pay for 6 DVD copies so everyone gets a set. Now I also know what to do with our wedding VCR, too. Just in time for our 25th wedding anniversary! Great tips everyone!

Kevin, Thanks for your advice and tip on movie depot. Agreed that I don't want to send slides overseas. And good advice to send several slides of varying quality to see the end result before going with the volume. It's one thing for my Dad to go through the slides to before sending in, but a whole different can of worms to have my Dad scan, save and organize on a computer, and copy to discs. I think I'll test with my a small batch of my slides (I'll started with my trip to Europe 30 years ago) and then get my Dad started on the family's slides. Again thanks for the great advice.

Karen, If you do send them off (not even overseas) just remember if they are lost...that's it. I am a professional photographer and when I used film I found a lab that was within driving distance of my studio and never mailed my film. Lots of people did but it was a risk I was not willing to take. Do you have a slide projector? One thing you might do is before you send them off you could make yourself a little slideshow. Put the slides in a logical order, play some music, and show the slideshow... then video your show and put it in your computer. Not a professional presentation, but it could work for you and your family to enjoy before you go to the expense of having the slides copies. I think the most important thing has been mentioned here and that is to EDIT... be ruthless and get the first round copied. If that tells the story of those years, then stop. Less is usually more.

There are gadgets available either as a "stand-alone" which will copy your slides or negatives onto a USB memory stick or an SD card, or with a USB cable to connect to your PC. Is there a "Radio Shack" (or similar) shop near you?? Have a word with them. Roger

After reading reader reviews for zillions of slide copiers, I bought an Epson Perfection 4490 PHOTO. This unit works great, but is slow. Color and clarity are excellent. It also does negitives, photos, and documents. If you have Windows 7, dont use the included driver...down-load one from the Epson driver webpage.

Ellen, If you have I-Photo (on Mac), try duplicating one of you photos (I always Duplicate and keep the original) and then "Edit" and then "Adjust". You can then "Levels", etc and try adjusting until you get closer to what you think the original looked like. If you really are serious about correcting the photo you can also look into a program called "Photoshop Elements", but there is a higher leaning curve for that program. I find I can do alot in the edit program of I-Photos without going into my Photoshop Elements Program. Also, last time I flew, I saw SkyMall Magazine advertising a slide convertor to hook up to your computer. See can see it at -http://www.skymall.com/shopping/detail.htm?pid=102962361&c=102672393

Are there any of the conversion services that can restore color to faded slides? We have some incredible wildlife shots from our time in Alaska in the 70's, but they are badly faded.

@Lola,
There are lots of way to increase the contast and restore or add color to those faded slides in photoshop. It would be a restoration process so unless you want to learn it there are lots of digital artists that can do that for you.

I'm a little late posting on this topic but I have some important suggestions if doing yourself. Your scanner MUST have infrared scanning capability to nullify dust. Remember that slides are tiny and a otherwise irrelevant dust particle or lint becomes an asteroid on your scan. If you want to do it right your scanner should accept color profiling. Buy an IT8 Color target matching the type of film you are scanning (i.e. Kodachrome, Ecktachrome, etc.) and then profile your scanner to that film. This then will produce color scans that match the color of your slides. Ecktachrome film dyes fade unevenly over time and if your Ecktachrome slides are over thirty years old will show a distinct redish colorcast. This is easy to null out automatically with the right software. Buy a bag of photographers lint free gloves and use them whenever scanning. You can find them online at many outlets. Some scanners are better than others. The really best way to do large numbers of slides is with a drum scanner from a German company costing just over five figures. Obviously that is out of the range of the consumer but there are others that are good. Do your homework because just a couple are truly outstanding. Plan on spending $800-$1,000. You can easily sell it on eBay when you are done for $600-$800. If sending them out avoid your Coscos and Walgreens. Go to a shop where you can talk to the people and ask them how they do their work. Most places scann at 3,000dpi and offer 4,000 or more. Going beyone maybe 2,400dpi doesn't buy you much of an advantage for consumer slides but 3,000 is a good number to use. Anything more than 3,000 is a waste in my opinion for consumer or hobbiest produced slides.

I'm late replying too, but I have another suggestions. We have used ScanCafe for all of our gazillion slides, as well as my parents'. The cool thing is, you send off your slide trays (no need to take them out) and they scan them all. Then, they put the images up online and you pick out only the ones you want. MUCH easier to sort than trying to do it slide by slide. After you have made your choices, they burn a DVD, and send it and the originals back to you. They do send them to India. I was very worried about getting originals back, so we sent one tray at a time. Not a single one was lost, or even out of place on return. I was very pleased with their service and quality.

Some really bad advice (use your flatbed desktop scanner) and some laughable, nonsensical gibberish ("MUST have infrared scanning capability to nullify dust") in here. The original post is more than a year old, so this is a good example of a thread that should probably be left to die.

Maybe should be left to die, but I just went through this with my late father-in-law's slides. We had 116 boxes of 36 slides each scanned. Most were Kodachrome from the 1950's. I used Scancafe.com and was very happy with it. Don't expect short turn-around, but quality was good and out of 116 boxes, only on e had any slides out of order when returned. They can also do color correction and you can review the scans online and reject up to 10% and just not pay for them, so less need to rigorously pre-filter out bad shots. Just my experience. No connection, etc...

I had thousands of old slides and I'm cheap - so I decided to try something.
I set up a slide projector aimed into a closet, put my SLR digital camera on a tripod and began showing the slides. When I came to one I wanted digitized I snapped a picture. I then used Picasa (a free editing program for pictures from Google) to change the red or yellow tint of old ones, cropped, enhanced, straightened or whatever. That was quicker than the gizmos that only take 4 slides at a time and WAY cheaper than getting it commercially done. Some pictures I opted to do in black and white if the color was too bad on the really old ones. They are not all "professional" looking but they are far better than I expected and fun for remembering trips and events of my childhood 50++ years ago. You can also make gift CDs for family or friends using that program and add text to pictures so you can remember what the heck that was!

I just converted some old slides. I used Costco and Dps.Dave.com, I am pleased with the outcome. With Costco you can order extra DVD's and they are placed on Memory Safe for a short period of time. This allows others and you to view the converted slides. YesVideo does their conversions. With DpsDave only one CD is available. This is the cheapest service at .25 per slide, paid with PayPal account. I must say I was impressed with the speediness of their service. Plus, I got emails letting me know that my slides had been received and when they were being shipped back.

I'm actually glad this topic resurfaced. A year ago when responses came in from my first post and I checked into several sites, it sounded like you had to take slides out of a tray. Too much work so never did anything. But I like the idea of sending 1 tray at a time and editing on line.
thanks for the info!