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.

You can see the scanner I purchased for these items here.