Genealogy During the Pandemic: Digitizing Your Slides

If you are old enough to remember when photography meant cameras, film, and flash attachments, then you probably also have boxes of photos, negatives, and slides. Travel has always involved photography, but for those of us "born in the day," that meant dozens of rolls of slide film, leading to hundreds of slides each time we took a trip. Years of vacations and family reunions before digital cameras came along led to thousands of slides sitting in Kodak Carousel trays taking up a vast amount of shelf space.

What to do about those slides?

The enforced extra time at home has had many family historians beginning ambitious projects, and taking stock of all those slides on closet shelves seemed long overdue. Although you may have been scanning photos for years now, did you know that you can also scan your slides? You can, of course, have them professionally scanned, but if you have boxes and boxes of them, that will get expensive very quickly. Is it difficult to do it yourself? No, it is not! Is it time-consuming? Yes, it is, but it is also very gratifying to see the results!

Slide-Scanning 101

While all-in-one printer/scanners are fine for home photo scanning, they are not meant for scanning slides, unless you have purchased a high-end model that comes with a dedicated slide scanner. There are also attachments you can get for some digital cameras and you can make light boxes for slides. The easiest way to tackle a large number of slides, however, is to buy some basic equipment that will make your job much easier.

You will need a dedicated slide scanner, and, surprisingly, you can get a reliable table-top model very reasonably. You want one that is compatible with the size of your slides. The scanner you purchase should be able to capture your images with the highest color quality possible (around 20 megapixels is ideal for printing). You want one that will hold multiple images on an ordinary memory card (most use SD cards, the flat plastic ones that you put into a digital camera), and that can link to your computer with a USB cord. You will also want to invest in a robust photo editing software program. Although most slide scanners come with rudimentary controls for changing brightness and rotation, it’s best to do that in a software program that gives you more control after you have captured the image.

How does it work?

A slide scanner will come with a plastic tray in which you insert your slide. Some come with trays that allow you to scan more than one at a time, but most are one in/one out. Some scanners save images to their own internal drives, but those are usually limited in size. The better option is to insert an SD card so you can scan many images without running out of memory. 

Most scanners come with a USB cord that connects from the scanner to a power adapter. You plug the adapter into a regular electric socket and turn the scanner on. Then you choose the slide option (many will let you scan negatives as well as slides). Center your slide in the tray and insert the tray so it is centered in the viewing window; then press the button to scan it. After a second or two, the image will be saved, and you can remove the tray and proceed to your next image. The whole process is quick so you can get through dozens of slides once you have established your rhythm.

When you are ready to move on, you remove the USB cord from the power adapter and plug it into your computer. You do not need any software to open the scanner; your computer will recognize it as an external drive, just as it does a stick drive or external hard drive, and you then can copy the images off and save them to your desktop or hard drive.

Your images will be in JPG format and can be opened by any application that can read that type of file. Once you open your image, you can crop, adjust contrast, balance the light levels, or even eliminate any distractions, like phone wires or stray people. You can change the size of the image, if you like, and then save it and/or print it. 

Scanning your slides means the images won’t deteriorate any more than they have already done, and you can continue to enjoy them. Honestly, when they sit in drawers or boxes, how often do you look at them? On your computer, however, they are safe (because you do, of course, back up everything faithfully!) and they can be preserved and easily shared.

Although we cannot endorse particular products, you can look online for recommendations and reviews of slide scanners and photo editing software. Send a note to publications@stlgs.org if you want specifics of products that work for us.