Transfering Photographic Slides to Laptop

Obelisk29

Hi, not entirely sure if right forum, so mods please feel free to move.

A friends father has a collection of about 35,000 old photographic slides dating back over the last 60 years or so.

He now wants to transfer them to a laptop.

I'm sure there are companies around who do this type of thing but he doesn't have much of a budget.

Anybody have any suggestions how to do this as a DIY project. What type of equipment does he need to get.

TIA

O29

rymus

Getting a decent slide scanner would (unless you got one hell of a discount) be a damnsight cheaper than getting a company to scan 35,000 slides. Maybe something like a low end Nikon Coolscan or something?

http://www.technikdirekt.de/main/en/computer/scanner/scanner-film-dia/page.html

mathias

From a DIY point of view this scanner does a pretty good job ,

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=315229

Although with 35000 slides thats a long project ,

having them done professionally will maybe be better quality but for that amount its going to cost a lot , the scanner may be a cheaper option ,

A typical charge per slide is about 30 cents , that mounts up fast and you would be looking at about 500 euro per 1000 slides when shipping etc is taken into account.

Pro services usually use Nikon Coolscan 5000ED or 9000 scanners , these are fast and would cut down the time to complete the transfer , you can buy one of these yourself for about €1200 and €2700 respectively.

So for 35000 slides it would seem that buying the equipment and doing it yourself is by far the cheaper option.

JMcL

Ouch! 35000 is a lot of work. Each scan takes an appreciable amount of time, having done this a bit before going digital.

You don't say if they're all 35mm or if there's medium or large format slides included. Something like the Nikon mentioned will probably give you the best results, but I'm not sure it'll handle anything other than 35mm, and since they're slide, you'll be doing them one by one!

A better, and cheaper, option might be a good flatbed scanner. The Epson V700 has pretty universal praise, and comes with film holders for a variety of sizes. If you need to deal with large format sheet film, I think you can get a fluid mount for free by asking Epson with this to make sure the sheet stays flat (no ide why they don't just include it). The Epson 4990 is cheaper again, and supposed to be good too. The advantage to either of these is you get a top quality scanner for other purposes as well.

Good luck!

magicbastarder

JMcL wrote:

since they're slide, you'll be doing them one by one!

nikon sells an automatic feeder which bolts on to their 35mm scanner, allowing you to put a couple of dozen slides in and let it work away to its heart's content. if you were to scan them yourself, it's the only option; unless you value your time as being extremely cheap. working fast, with my nikon scanner (manually), i'd regard scanning an entire film in an hour as fairly standard. that hour includes straightening, etc., while the scanner is working away.

still, 35,000 slides - some serious culling required. and some storage...

feileacan

definetly go for a dedicated slide / negative scanner. the quality will be a lot better.

he'll need some serious external hard drive storage and backup facilities - i.e 500G drives or would recommend getting RAID.

he/she should decide on an optimium resolution and size for each print (im definetly not an expert - anyone any suggestions ?), and file type (i believe TIFF would be the best but has a relatively large file size).

its a mega job - should take about 7 years... i scanned in about a 1000 of my parents old pictures. it took for ever to scan and even longer to sort, catalagour and tag them all. worth the effort - just !

what laptop does he / she have - recommend a mac with aperture software for the sorting and cataloging

let us know what he / she decides.

Alun

I agree. A few weeks ago I rather foolishly agreed to scan in a mere 120 slides for my sister, and after doing a batch of 16 or so, I have to go and do something else for an hour or so to stop myself going mad. If they're old slides there'll be a lot of correcting to do as well .. colour correction, dust removal, brightness/contrast, etc. etc., so beware. 35,000 doesn't even bare thinking about.

magicbastarder

at full res, i'd say an LZW TIFF from a nikon scanner would rarely stray below 20MB.
even with the scanner having scanned all the pics automatically, you're still looking at legwork of cropping (unless they've now got an automatic cropping function), and rotating.

pete4130

I've got a Canon 9900f flatbed neg scanner. It takes up to 8 slides at a time and at full res and its painstakingly slow. There is a hell of alot of post scanning work to do as well.....35,000.....I feel light headed thinking about it!

JMcL

Oh, just to add, given the age range goes back 60 years, you most defintely want something that uses ICE. This will remove 90% of dust and scratches from the slides (within reason anyway). Also given the volume involved, you might want to check out 3rd party scanning software rather than sit slaving over Photoshop for a couple of years. VueScan, and Silverfast have good reputations (I haven't actually used either of these myself as yet, but was doing some reading up on them recently), and can handle scanning multiple slides at a time (eg loading up a bunch of them and putting them on the bed of the scanner)

ladgie353

What would your friend's father do with the pictures on the laptop?
The reason I ask is that if it is just to display them then there would be no need to scan them at full res, so any flatbed scanner like the espon 4990 would be enough.
If he wants to modify and print them, though, then the slide/neg would be the only solution. (35000 * 20 Mb = very big HD...)

minikin

this is an incredible amount of work, so you need to think laterally about it.
They're for your mates dad and he has a limited budget.
You need to apply the principle of the production triangle (which i use to explain things to clients all the time)

the triangle has three points - quality, speed and cost.
You can only ever have two points of the triangle
if you want high quality and low cost then it's going to take forever.
If you want high quality and a quick turnaround then it's going to cost a lot.
If you want low cost and a quick turnaround - you get low quality
etc....

from this point of view (low cost and it has to be done quickly due to the sheer amount of images) quality has to be compromised.

The only way I see of doing this is the old fashioned way... you need to photograph the transparency with a digital slr. Forget scanning them - far too slow and you'll go mentally insane.

You can photograph them in two ways -
get one of these... http://slidecopier.com/

or use a projector:
buy a decent one and screen (or his dad may have one if he has 35,000 slides)
Mount camera on tripod in line with projector, shoot to your hearts content.
correct exposure will be consistent from slide to slide so once you've corrcted for one correctly exposed slide the rest won't be far off.
This is by far the quickest way of achieving what you want. Which is the biggest consideration with such a large number. The quality may not be as good as a scan but remember they're for your dad's mate... not for repro in an art mag...

You need to think in terms of the time you'll save - loading up a tray of slides for a projector is a lot quicker than individually loading them into a scanner or slide copier. Also you don't have to worry about saving each file, just dump the files off your card or even better shoot directly onto the laptop.

This will be a lot more enjoyable that sitting by yourself scanning for the rest of your life. (have a slide shoot party with beers and tayto!)

magicbastarder

even with that method, which makes most sense, he needs to seriously reduce the amount he wants to keep.

Obelisk29

Thanks a million to all who replied - really appreciated.

I'll do a bit of research but it is obvious that it is a much bigger project than he has imagined!

His collection is truely amazing - he spent over 40 years as a diplomat and worked all over the world.

Although there's a lot of the 'family on the beach' type material, there is a huge amount of material documenting some very significant times in the countries he's served in. I think there is a lot of stuff that may be of historical interest to the national archives of some of the places he's worked in.

He's in his late 70s now and a widower. I think he see's cataloging and converting the slides as his last project (and if he does 35k slides it bloody well will be!) - a bit of a magnum opus for the kids.

Thankfully, he seems to be very well organised and the slides appear to be reasonably well cataloged already.

The one thing I hadn't really appreciated was the sheer amount of storage required - better price up a couple of servers!

Again, many thanks for the info.

O29