One Way To Digitize Those Old Slides

There was a time when lots of photographers took slides. It was a great way to entertain family and friends.

Now, with a closet full of those slide trays, we find ourselves with families scattered and living in the digital age.

For a couple years now, I’ve wanted to get those slides into my computer but didn’t know exactly how to do it. After some research, it was decided that sorting and editing thousands of slides and then scanning them in and then editing the results would be just too time consuming.

The other possibility was to let someone else do it, but the cost for that just didn’t seem worth it, so I did it by simply photographing the slides.

I got out the slide projector and set it on the dining table. I set up the projector screen on the other side of the table and then set up a tri-pod behind the projector. We put up a piece of posterboard against the screen to make a white background. Our screen is grey in color and wrinkled from being rolled up. We then projected a slide, and turned on the digital camera. Zoomed in to fill the LCD, and took photos of one tray of slides.

I loaded the photos into iPhoto (I use a Macintosh) and took a look at them. Wow, what a great job it did on those old slides.

It took just a few hours to put 2,500 slides on my computer. They are now ready to be edited, and then emailed, put on a website, printed, or placed on DVD’s for safe keeping and for gifts.

We have just a few more to do, but it is a very worthwhile project and fun to do. If you have a bunch of old slides and want to put them on your computer, I recommend you give this method a try.