Hiring a service or person to scan 35mm slides in detail?

[mikef7]

Hi everyone here - thanks for all your help -

 

I have been struggling with archiving almost a thousand old family slides from the 1940s to the 1980s, and wanting it done really well, perhaps much better than any service can do.

 

I've had some real help here on Photo.net, but it also helped me realize I wasted real time and money using a poor platform (an Epson V600) in what I can now only regard as a "first pass" - SIGH. For a summary, see this thread.

 

I've had a number of suggestions for how to do things better in a second pass, but it seems really thorny:

• @andylynn suggested "Rig up a high res DSLR or mirrorless with a macro lens, a light source and something to hold it all together, and photograph the slide frames". I've never had a DSLR and don't want to make a career of this. I just want slide images.
  
• @AlanKlein said I should send it to a service or I'd go crazy. But what service not only does a great 35mm image, but also scans the frame mount, front and back? (Not at as high rez as the 35mm images, but still ... read on)
  
• I have also asked, what is the actual functional maximal resolution from 35mm slides. @JDMvW was very helpful here - except for pinpointing which particular hardware is available now that might work best for a thousand slides, for a newbie. (Thanks so much JDMvW! Please say a little more in terms of what I can do, minimizing my own time and/or money?)
  

I hope I don't seem too groping in the dark. Here is what I would like to have answered, or do, ultimately:

• Is there a consensus on what actual practical resolution can be had from any hardware platform, relative to simple consumer-grade 35mm slides from the 1940s to the 1980s? I understand that most (all?) devices you can buy now grossly overstate their actual resolution ... the Epson V600 I bought and had my son scan the thousand slides on, was comically inadequate (long story here). Past hardware overstating their bounds, what are the realistic bounds? And what hardware might do it?
  
• If I were to get a service, they would have to not only scan the slide images, but also the mounts themselves. This is important for reconstructing five decades of slides mixed together ... it's like a huge jigsaw puzzle. The mounts themselves help piece together "these were shot at approximately the same time". Do any slide services get both images and actual mounts, both sides of the mounts? (The mounts don't have to be high resolution, of course)
  
• Are any of you here willing to help, getting both the mounts and the images? I can pay. You could upload them to Google Drive. I hope I'm not crossing a boundary in asking. You can private-message me.
  

I don't want to make my own DSLR rig and I don't want to hire a service that is wham-bam image only. If someone wants to refer others to me, or direct message me, that's great.

 

I hope that this message doesn't sound too ... flailing around.

 

But I want it done well. And I am flailing.

[Robin Smith]

Easiest way I think would be to use a high-ish resolution camera (DSLR or mirrorless) (30 MP+) and your bullet one method: take a picture of the whole slide including mount (both sides). That way you would have 2 copies (one reversed) of each slide and the mount details too. Cropping and working on the image itself would be done as usual. As to who would want to do this I've no idea. Of course, you don't want to buy a camera, so this is probably a non-starter for you. I think there's about 20-25 MP resolution in a 35mm slide, although that resolution is noisier than a native digital image of the same resolution.

[mikef7]

Robin, what you say makes lots of sense. I don't care about file size or storage - it's now or never, and storage costs are a footnote to any future-minded discussion.

Do you know anyone of a serious archival mind (like you) I can hire?

[bgelfand]

If I understand your post correctly, you want the slide mount scanned to obtain the date the slide was processed and therefore the approximate date the picture was taken. In that case you are making the project overly complicated. I would suggest:

 

1) Choose a decent DAM (Digital Asset Manager). One that allows you to keyword your files. I used the Organizer from Photoshop Elements when I was shooting mostly film and it stood me in good stead until I started shooting RAW files on a DSLR. Organizer allows you to associate multiple hierarchical keywords with a file - hierarchical being an important consideration.

 

2) Hand sort the slides by date. Yes, I know you have 1,000, but how hard can it be? Many are probably in slide boxes already grouped by date.

 

3) Scan each group separately. Place the scans in a separate subdirectory titled by date in a main directory titled "Family Pictures" or any other descriptive title you choose.

 

4) Separate the slides by roll within date and file the physical slide by roll. Label the container for each roll, be it box or file sleeve, with an arbitrary number starting with R001 (that will give you room for 999 rolls. If you want more room make it R0001, R stands for Roll.). File the boxes / sleeves in order by number R001, R002,..., Rnnn so you can find them easily.

 

5) Rename the scan images in each subdirectory files to RxxxFyy where Rxxx is the roll number and Fyy is the sequence number from the slide frame. This gives each scan a unique name across subdirectories and allows you to fine the physical slide quickly and easily should you ever need to do so.

 

6) Import the images in the subdirectory into your DAM.

 

7) In the DAM change to DATE TAKEN on the files to reflect the date on the slide mounts. You can usually do a mass change.

 

8) Now the most important step. Keyword each file. A good DAM will allow you to use multiple keywords on an image. Give considerable thought to designing you keyword hierarchy. An example might be FAMILY > SMITH > Adam Smith and FAMILY > JONES > Eve Jones and FAMILY > SMITH > Charles Smith Then you might have other keywords like GRANDFATHER and FATHER or MOTHER. Thus an image of your Grandfather Adam Smith would have the keywords Adam Smith and GRANDFATHER. With a good DAM, you can always add and change keywords. Nothing is cast in concrete.

 

Now with a few clicks of the mouse checking various keyword boxes, you can find any image or sets of images. Since the name of the images relates to the physical slide, you can quickly locate the slide itself should you need it.

 

This system has worked well for me while I was shooting mostly film and extended easily to my digital shooting. By not scanning the slide mounts you reserve the pixels for the detail in the slides - the data rather than the metadata as it were.

[mikef7]

bgef, you are seeing the complexity. In one sense I have the first hurdle solved - I have each slide numbered. Many of the things you make sense. In theory, they're mostly in packs. In practice, a given slide can be anywhere.

You advocate PE DAM for organizing? okay

What I really need is a simple system any of the sibs can drop in to find theirself as a baby in 1971, or whatever. You're saying DAM allows for infinite tags, as it were. Coolio.

You have not said anything about actual hardware or realistic dpi. I don't want to do this all over again unless it's going to be wonderfully re-scanned.

I will have a lot of fields, including actual exposure date, and then, time and place, on top of the rest. macro scans of frames will help here.

[AJG]

My guess is that any service that would do what you want (scan the slide and the mount itself) will be very pricey. The mounts will need to be shot with totally different lighting from the slides and keeping them together is the only way that would guarantee the slide mount information would stay with the picture. I think that, much as you don't want to do the work (and I understand completely why you feel that way) to keep the price down under 5 figures you or your family members will have to bite the bullet and do it yourselves.

[Robin Smith]

Good point about the illumination. You would indeed need some light to illuminate the slide mount. A different approach would be to copy the slide once without the mount to capture a high res shot of it and then take a set of slides on a light table for reference with both the light table light on and top illumination. This latter could be a much more casual shot. The resulting image would show, say, 10 slides with their mounts (depending on the size of the light table) sufficient to be able to read them, and the light from the light table would show you the image so you can cross reference it with the high res "scan". My feeling is that there is no one who would really want to do this task, or at least at a price that makes any sense, because it would have to be a labor of love for so many slides. I suggest you are the best person to do this. A daunting task!

[RaymondC]

If a Epson flatbed scanner isn't up to the job then you need to go and use a dedicated film scanner, a digital camera or outsource the job. Like someone else said it is going to be a big job and not cheap. One way or another, either you get the equipment and DIY or you get some other firm / someone to do it with equipment that yields the quality you are after.

 

In terms of the date etc .. you can use a EXIFTOOL editor which you can add in things like date, time, camera brand and model and batch it so it is automatic for the entire roll. I do that to a roll of film and put them in sequence 1 to 36 with a date and time and then each photo is like 1min later than the photo before.

[wgpinc]

Very good and cost effective scanning service: www.digmypics.com scancafe.com.

The leading photo scanning, slide scanning, 8mm to DVD video transfer service

In the USA in Arizona. My brother highly recommended it.

 

scan cafe sends your negs or slides to India but they do reputedly a great job.

 

Seven or eight years ago I scanned a large number of slides on my Konica/Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400. It was a lot of work and time consuming but worth it to me. Good luck!

[JDMvW]

There's really no short cut to quality results.

 

Personally, I came to the conclusion that I had to do it myself to get the results I wanted.

 

e.g.,

2015: A scanning Odyssey - Nikon Super Coolscan LS-9000 ED

 

with links to other scanning posts here.

[john_wheeler6]

Hi Mikef7

It is not hard to get into "analysis paralysis" of having the perfect answer.

Maybe the perfect answer is getting decent digital images to your siblings semi sorted in folders of approximate era so it is in their hands for enjoyment ASAP.

 

Often the joy of looking back on family photos is an image that is good enough to evoke the feelings/emotions of that different era and not the technical perfectness of the scan. Just going by my own experience and struggles having to do this for 3000 family slides my parents had taken over a similar number of decades.

 

So here is what I decided to do. Note that many slides came in bunches of either 24 or 36 depending on the type of film you used. So likely for 1000 total slides you are talking about ~40 rolls of film.

 

- group the slides in about that many groups trying to find which goes with which slide roll. I have found that on the ones I used, the slide carrier had slight differenes and/or there were impressed dates on the slides. In any case, group them by the roll of film which went together. If you can because the slides had a stamp number you can put them in order for each original roll of film yet that is less critical since getting it done is of priority.

 

- I used Larsen Digital in Utah (not shipped overseas) and they did a great job for me. You an select the format and resolution with many other possible post processing options depending on your desired investment level: Digital Conversion | Larsen Digital | Digital Transfer

 

- At the bottom of the linked web page there are many links for their servcies and one of those links is prepping your slides: How to prepare order for digital conversion | Larsen Digital

 

- I banded each group of slides (based on the roll of film from which there were derived) and labeled them. Larsen digital can provide back to you CDs (or even online) the images which each group in its own named folder. So one does not need to make it as complex as a full DAM system yet just one master folder that has each slide group in its own sub folder (each approximate timeframe is what I used)

 

- You can get the sides back in the same package and order as you sent to them - just request it. So in that very very rate case where someone says I want an even better image than what was captured digitally, you could always pull out that one slide (since you have it organized) for special scanning and post processing. Note that in the 20 years in which I have had the digital copies from Larsen Digital - not once have I gone back to the color slides (though I do have them in storage).

 

- I believe I opted to get the highest resolution in TIFF format at extra expense yet on retrospect, for how the images have been used, that was way overkill.

 

Hope this helps give you a path to consider to get the job done and out of your hair and our of analysis paralysis :)

 

John Wheeler

[otto1]

"It is not hard to get into "analysis paralysis" of having the perfect answer."

 

 

I am keeping this snippet of great wisdom.

 

We do high volume commercial photographic scanning in Australia, and this seems to be a common problem with our clients.

 

The answer generally is: just do it, do it in logical sequence such as oldest first, and most issues sort themselves.

 

And as you say, get them distributed sooner, organise them later.