I purchased a scanner for the slides and negatives I have in my collection of family history materials. There needs to be some thought before I just start running materials through the scanner.
I don’t want to capture just what is on the slides. There’s more that I need–information on the boxes some of the slides are in and information written on the slide itself.
I need to tie that information to the slides that were in a specific box. The box in the image contained slides of photos taken when my grandparents and I went to Nebraska in 1990. None of the slides in that box have anything written on them but I need to track which images came from the box with the “1990 Nebraska Us & Michael Trip.”
And the slides that have information written on them. I need to preserve that as well. Unfortunately not all slides are identified, but some are as shown in the image.
Scanning the slides is important, but so is preserving the organization and identification information.
I need to organize the images in folders that match the boxes (along with including the box image). I need to pair each identified slide with the corresponding digital image.
Preserving images is about more than preserving images.
4 Responses
Once you’ve scanned your box of slides, are you putting them into computer folders? We’ve had computer crashes and lost files over the years… When my husband scanned our boxes of slides, he then burned a CD of each subject/time period, etc. It is easy to duplicate and share the CD with other family members who are interested in having a certain set.
Accompanying explanatory paper work can also be scanned like a slide and added to the CD. And yes, it is troubling to think of the day when a cd can’t be played back on a tv or computer…
Looking forward to hearing how you manage all this. I’ve scanned and saved slides but didn’t take any of that into consideration so will need to figure out a redo.
Please keep us posted on your pros and cons of this scanner.
Too many pictures can be scary. I make A4 printups of selected pictures and put them into ring binders, with information on the back in pencil. All the oldest pictures are black and white, so a laser printer does the job cheaply, and one gets the benefit of the analogue detail. I store digital images as well, but the large paper copies give a lot more pleasure
Most computers don’t have CD/DVD drives any more! I think flash drives is what’s mainly being used….but there’s always distant storage options that libraries utilize