Slide Retrieval

 In my last post I mentioned that I was dealing with our 1000 strong slide collection.

 I wanted to share my experience because it may help someone else.

Those of us of a certain age may have boxes of old slides and are wondering what to do about them. 

Some people may be quite happy to load up their slides onto a projector carrier and enjoy watching them in the old way .... that is, projected up onto a screen or a wall. In the past we had a lot of fun at family gatherings doing just that. 

 Others may be happy to view them through the little viewers, still available, one at a time.  

But for several decades ours have sat untouched in the loft and we have wondered what on earth to do ..... we did not want to lose the memories. So it was time to get to grips with the problem.

Here are the slides.

I did a bit of on-line research and found something to help. 

A mobile film scanner.

(Our own A4 scanner was of no help.) 

 The new piece of kit duly arrived.

Here it is. It was £19. Battery operated (2 x AA)

In the meantime I had looked at every single slide on a small viewer deciding what to keep. It was easy. Mould, deterioration, poor quality etc. In this way we halved the lot and 500 didn`t seem so daunting.

The mobile phone rests on top, slides are placed on the tiny lit screen and after lining up and focussing, you just take a photo. Lining up is done just the once. 

It was so easy that I had completed the lot in two afternoons.

After each box, I did the first editing on my mobile phone .... cropping and some colour improvement. I then transferred these to my laptop computer, where I put them into files of their box numbers.

From here I was able to do more editing via my own photo editing app. When things were too orange or too blue, I actually changed them to black and white.

My family are excited to see them and quite a few have been back and forth on whatsapp.

And I think they may want copies. With this in mind I then re-categorised them under more useful titles which in our case were ...

house and garden

family

holidays

Finally I backed them all up on a memory stick and was astonished when they all fitted on one 32GB stick.

So it was this ...

..... to this ....

..... in less than a week.

This evening I got rid of all 6 boxes. The card ones were burnt but the plastic ones had the actual photo pushed out and were then binned.

I highly recommend this easy piece of kit

mobile photo scanner

It is easy and quick to use and a very reasonable price.

The memories are safe.

And being enjoyed all over again.

This was our first greenhouse circa 1976.