Putting old photos and slides to digital

[mtnwrunner]

So, I have a metric shit ton of old hunting photos and slides in boxes.
I'd love to scan them and put them on a memory stick of some sort.
Done a bit of research but figured I'd ask the experts here. Anyone got a nice easy way of doing this??

As always, thanks!

Randy

 

[hawkman71]

I, too, have a shit ton of images, mostly family, though, that is like scanned. I've done some myself but it's tedious.

I've looked at a few online sites and their reviews. One thing that struck me is some get sent overseas. If like to know the quality will be high.

Legacy box might have been one site. Can't recall the others. It's been awhile.

I guess I should send a box in and see.

 

[recon493]

I purchased an old 50mm pentax 1:1 lens and converted it to the Sony E mount. It fits into a Pentax bellows system that allows you to drop the slide in with the distance already set/ focused and just rip and run. Its a manual process for sure but can be had for fairly cheap on ebay I think.

 

[RS_Non-Res]

Have not yet but am getting ready to use https://www.DPSDave.com.
Their basic service is suitable for prints and they have an add-on service that can bump the resolution of the scan to be finer-grained than the dyes and silver grain in the film/paper being scanned.
Now I just need to choose which slides and prints are worth digitizing and pull them from the sleeves.

 

[jaycrooker_2]

I organize and scan photos/slide as a side gig, and have a few suggestions:
1. determine what you want to save FIRST before scanning. Not worth the time to scan a bunch of slides you don't want to use later. Crappy pics or ones of scenery you don't remember or can't way where it was...don't bother scanning.
2. if you want to do it yourself, I'd recommend an Epson v600. It has slide trays and excellent scanning quality for $250: https://www.amazon.com/Epson-Perfection-Negative-Document-Scanner/dp/B002OEBMRU
3. scanning slides is time intensive, both because of scanning time and getting them clean. Be prepared to dust off slides, and re-do as dust always seems to settle just where you don't want it (on people's faces, etc). Get one of these: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/318545-REG/Giottos_AA1910_Rocket_Air_Blower.html

 

[idcuda]

scanning slides is time intensive

That's no joke - I tried the Epson route. I gave up and sold it. You better be retired if you want to scan even a small amount of film.

 

[ccc9092]

I organize and scan photos/slide as a side gig, and have a few suggestions:
1. determine what you want to save FIRST before scanning. Not worth the time to scan a bunch of slides you don't want to use later. Crappy pics or ones of scenery you don't remember or can't way where it was...don't bother scanning.
2. if you want to do it yourself, I'd recommend an Epson v600. It has slide trays and excellent scanning quality for $250: https://www.amazon.com/Epson-Perfection-Negative-Document-Scanner/dp/B002OEBMRU
3. scanning slides is time intensive, both because of scanning time and getting them clean. Be prepared to dust off slides, and re-do as dust always seems to settle just where you don't want it (on people's faces, etc). Get one of these: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/318545-REG/Giottos_AA1910_Rocket_Air_Blower.html

This is great advice. There are a lot of services out there for this as well that will do all the legwork, I wouldn't waste my time scanning everything myself unless you wanted to continue shooting film.

Here are two companies that will do that for you. Family used Legacy Box for old VHS and they were great.

Best Video Transfer Services: Convert Old Videos To Digital

Memory Fortress: EXPERT Video Transfer Services & photo scanning. PRESERVE precious memories. MODERNIZE your family history TODAY! Protect against...

memoryfortress.com

Legacybox® — Digitize Home Movies, Photos, Slides & More

Simplest and easiest way to convert your recorded media to digital. Legacybox is the world's largest digitizer of home movies, photos & film.

legacybox.com

 

[RS_Non-Res]

Followup or thread resurrection, your choice:

I used https://www.DPSDave.com as indicated above. I was pretty happy with the whole thing. The service was as fast as expected. Cleanup and resolution were very good (4-8 mb). Price about right and every picture was right side up. I paid extra for a flash drive, instead of cloud storage/download.

I won't pay extra for file names and folder organization next time b/c I screwed it up on several of the pictures and having all the pictures sorted into folders made looking at them harder. I'll do it myself next time.

I sorted through my stack and only sent off 175. I mostly kept the people pictures and sentimental ones, b/c the landscapes don't really change that much and there are more and better of those on the interwebs.

My only disappointment was that probably half of my original slides were just plain crappy pictures. I tended to back focus a lot and a bunch showed camera movement, so they never should have been scanned in the first place.

Some of the scans are posted in the one photo a day tread.

I'm going to go through through the boxes and books and round up a bunch of old prints and send them off too. Maybe I'll be a little more selective.