03 Jul 3 Approaches to Scanning Slides
Scanning slides is a great way to remember friends and family from long ago.
Do you remember looking at photo slides? My dad would carefully put his slides in a carousel, set up the screen and the projector. The entire family would sit on the couch and relive our latest vacation by viewing the slides.
Between the early 1960’s to the early 2000’s, my dad took thousands of slides! After he passed away, we didn’t know what to do with all the slides! We didn’t want to throw them all out. But who could possibly look through thousands of photo slides?
Curating
My sister undertook the onerous task of curating the slides. She tossed the near duplicates, the slides that were blurry or had heads cut off. She removed slides of landscapes that were no longer meaningful. There were still close to 2,000 slides when she was done.
If the goal is to have a nice, inclusive memory collection of the highlights of lives, then it’s extremely important to curate the slides. The slides that do not add to the ultimate goal must be ruthlessly culled. Of course, this is much easier said than done.
Many of the slides have an emotional pull that’s hard to resist. The images are of people no longer young or no longer with us. They may be of places we visited, which no longer look like the image in the slide. You can read more about curating slides at this blog: https://preciousmemsphoto.com/2020/02/4-steps-to-prepare-slides-for-organizing-and-scanning/
Questions and Answers
The question I ask myself when curating one of my family’s collections is: What would my children or grandchildren be interested in seeing?
The answer, invariably, is images with people. Clear images with people. People doing things, people in groups, people enjoying themselves. Birthday parties, Christenings, holidays, vacation pictures are all worth keeping. Pictures with images of people in the foreground or middle ground are great. Pictures in which the people are small and incidental to the scenery need to be culled.
Consider this image:
Compared to this image:
In my experience, the clients who carefully curated their slide collections ended up the most satisfied with the results.
Why use a Photo Organizer?
I’ve seen photo and slide collections which were scanned by send-away companies. They send you a box, and you load it up with your slides. A few weeks later, they send back the original slides along with a CD or USB with the scanned images. What could be better or easier?
In my experience, the images come back in no particular order. Baby pictures are next to adult pictures of the same individual. Images are as faded as the originals. No enhancements were done.
By going with a Photo Organizer, the images will be organized as you prefer. Some people prefer chronological organization, others prefer to 
organize by individual. All the images will be enhanced to bring back the original color, as much as possible. This is an example:
If you have, or have inherited, a large slide collection and you need help or guidance in curating and scanning the collection, please contact PreciousMemories at www.PreciousMemsPhoto.com/Contact
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