How to keep my slide frames

[gchu1970]

<p>I use the Gepe antinewton ring glass slide mounts to hold my color slides. Would like to have ideas on how to keep those slide mounts in a box? Does any of you have some good ideas for me?</p>

[JDMvW]

<p>Glass slide covers used to be common, but (along with slides themselves) are less common today.<br>

Because of the added bulk, boxes need to be a little sturdier than for cardboard mounts. Even with the glass to protect the slides, however, it's still imperative that the box be of archival character. Thus wooden boxes are not really to be recommended because woods contain resins, etc. A Google™ for archival +box will reveal many companies offering archival storage boxes for photographic items.<br>

Again, the added bulk may make slide sleeve sheets also less attractive, depending, but there too it is essential that the transparent material be of archival quality. Cheap plastic sheets will have softeners and other contents that will potentially affect the images, although again, the glass helps, but I would not depend on it for complete protection.</p>

[david_henderson]

<p>Most people use archival sheets made by Clearfile or similar to hold 12 mounted slides. The sheets are kept either as suspended files or I'd guess more usually in albums. The good thing about this is that you can easily put your slides on a lightbox for viewing, selection etc. The problem with boxes is that each slide gets really hard to find.</p>

<p> </p>

[alex_lofquist]

<p>I've been using CLEAR-FILE Archival PLUS (format #218) from Porter's in Cedar Falls, Iowa. They are fairly inexpensive in quantity. They hold 20 slides per page and fit into standard loose leaf notebooks. </p>

[leicaglow]

<p>I used to work for the distributor of Gepe in the 80's, and the topic couldn't be more poignant to me as I was scanning slides from that era just last night. Being in boxes, they were a real PITA to go through, and I ended up putting them all in pages (I use Clear File, Vue All, and Savage archival). But Light Impressions sells some nice archival boxes if that's how you want to go.</p>

[JDMvW]

<p>My own experience dealing with well over 100,000 slides is that I personally find the sleeves are cumbersome and bulky when you have to deal with so many slides, and getting individual slides in and out of the sleeves is a pain to me. In a humid climate like mine, metal slide boxes with slides in groups (but not packed in tight) avoid problems with mildew better than sleeves, IMO. I also keep some silica gel in the box.</p>

<p>My metal boxes are organized by project, then by film roll, then exposure --and, since I finalized my system in the mid 70s, all date stamped with the day of the exposure. I never have any trouble going directly to a group of 18 slides that contain the one I want. Nearly all of my slides are scanned, most at high resolution, some at lower resolution for the record. If I need to, I can easily relocate a slide for rescanning at higher resolution, or other special treatment.</p>

<p>When I was still projecting them, I used to pull the most commonly used slides out into a special section of the box, arranged in something close to the order I tended to use them in for lectures, professional presentations, and the like. I also duped the most commonly used with a Repronar to protect the originals. I've now re-integrated most of those into the project-roll-slide number groups they came from, since all of the "best" (that is, "most useful," not an aesthetic judgment) have been scanned at high resolution (4000 dpi). I haven't projected a slide in years.</p>

<p>The flaw in my system is that toward the end of my film shooting days for work (as opposed to shooting my precious old DDR cameras for fun), I ended up shooting less slides and more color negative with a move toward digitizing the negatives rather than printing them. As I am still accumulating negatives from my Ossies, I have yet to work out a decent storage and access system for these. So far, I keep the strips in envelopes that are project/roll coded. Perhaps here I will go to the sleeves for the strips.</p>

<p>Try the sleeves and see. If you have only a few slides to archive they work well enough and the advantage of being able to pull out a page for the light table is real. On the other hand, if you have or will have a lot of images, consider the boxes.</p>