Still have old slides of photos?

Sunny

Sunny

SF VIP
Location
Maryland
My late husband was a tremendous slide taker. Until the 1990's, he took hundreds, maybe thousands of pictures of family, friends, and scenery. We watched the slide shows using a projector and large screen.

Needless to say, all that stopped with the advent of digital photography. Like everybody else, we switched to using our cell phones as cameras. Much easier and more flexible as to what you can do with all those pictures and videos.

The problem now is, what do I do with all those old slides? There are big fat albums each holding hundreds of slides, plus lots of shoeboxes. DH died about 15 years
ago, so obviously I didn't exactly rush to do anything about the slides. In fact, I've tried to avoid even thinking about the job of going through them, sorting them, digitizing them, printing them or whatever, and giving most of them to my kids and grandkids. They are the whole history of our family since we got married. So I really want to keep them. But what a job.

What complicates things is that we did digitize several hundred of them, because we were able to see them on our TV or computer. Alas, that is no longer the case. CD players, DVD's, etc. are as much a thing of the past as the old fashioned albums holding prints. So I have about a dozen useless DVD's with the digitized images of some of the slides.

So, what to do? No one will want a bunch of useless old 2" by 2" slides, so I've got to find a format that will work. I've come to the conclusion that old-fashioned paper prints are the best format for anything you want to keep. Paper will last, without new electronic changes every few years making our pictures obsolete.

I'll probably end up going through at least a lot of these pictures, sending them to a company such as Digmypics (Digitize My Pictures, get it?) and have them digitized and returned to me on a flash drive. That company also advertises that they can print them in an album, which would probably save me a lot of trouble, if their printing quality is any good. Maybe I could try that out on one album and see if it's good enough. If not, I could use the flash drive to send images to Shutterfly or Snapfish.

Or, does anyone have any other ideas? My husband was a dear, kind soul who probably had no idea how things would change in the future, and what a headache he was giving me!
 

Your thread gave me some motivation to crudely understand numbers of my own body of work. Although all is documented in old log files, I haven't done much with my film era media for over a decade so what I have is fading in my memory. Your media on CDs and DVDs can easily be converted to jpg's on computer hard drives. All you need is an external USB player. On my own new HP Omen 35L desktop, I run an external USB CD/DVD player that cost less than $15.

One can also crudely scan 35mm slides with scanner products, but results will have mediocre resolution, only useful for trivial small web display or small prints. Better just leave them as slide media and just use a loupe and light box to view any. Oh, one could use a Kodak projector for slightly better resolution, but that would not have any greater benefit versus a loupe for the very few people that might have a personal interest.

I still have old Kodachrome 64 slides taken between 1980 and 1999, after tossing probably 70% 2+ decades ago. Most were captured with better prime lens optics of that 35mm SLR camera era. They are all sorted by event/trip and many have supporting trip report documentation made at the time. A few hundred during the 1990s were scanned and made into Kodak Photo CDs that have mediocre digital resolution, only useful for trivial web use.

But the Photo CDs are useful to this person. Within recent weeks, I looked at some of the digital files for the first time in more than a decade. They as visual images immediately brought back into my brain memory much of what/when/why/where that would otherwise be forever lost. That is the greatest value of our pictures to we individuals.

Since most are landscape and nature and not social, they will never have value to other people other than this person. DSLR technology today is so advanced, that older 35mm slide or film even if drum scanned into digital is inferior. Other people would not even know what the images are of, even if they have some scenic value. Personally, only minor numbers are of possible value to younger generation relatives with children that I might pass them down to.

We of the 21st Century are the first human generation of science and technology where this has been possible. So in 300 years if the original media is still recoverable, some future archivist might find them valuable documents of what locations looked like long before. In any case, it all degenerates, physically decaying with time beyond our own lifetimes.

Beyond mere informational purposes, camera, photography, and printing technology will likely have vastly greater resolution and quality in another century that will make older images taken with current technology even more useless for making high quality prints than are 35mm slides today.
 
Last edited:
You might want to consider how many of those old slides your children and grandchildren would want to see, especially things like scenery. I know I've taken lots of slides that are of no interest to anyone, even me. You may find some that are practically duplicates. In that case you could just pick the best one. Maybe family can help sort through them.
 

I agree with @Grampa Don , go through them and toss the old sightseeing photos that have little meaning to anyone but you and focus on the ones that capture family and friends.

Have a get together with family and close friends to select the ones that have meaning to them, trash the leftovers.

I hate to see family photos and memories heaped on tables at the local flea market and would prefer to destroy them myself. 😢
 
Aunt Bea said:
I agree with @Grampa Don , go through them and toss the old sightseeing photos that have little meaning to anyone but you and focus on the ones that capture family and friends.

Have a get together with family and close friends to select the ones that have meaning to them, trash the leftovers.

I hate to see family photos and memories heaped on tables at the local flea market and would prefer to destroy them myself. 😢
Click to expand...
This is an excellent advice. I also had thousands of color slides and dumped almost all of them except maybe 100 with me as a child (taken by my father) and my parents.
Even my wife and I decided to throw away all slides with us together. So we did.
We don't have children, thus our slides are of no interest for other people.
 
Thanks to all for the excellent advice. About the scenery vs. people ones, I have come to the same conclusion, although some of the scenery pictures are excellent. It's hard to throw out pictures of the mountains of Yosemite, national parks such as Bryce Canyon, redwood forests, etc. But as you are all pointing out (and I thought of also), nobody really wants photos of the nice scenery on someone else's trip. My family travel a lot, and have their own photos.

David, your advice is very interesting. I never heard of an external USB player. Do they convert entire DVD's at once, or do you have to go picture by picture? I do have a gizmo that someone gave me that does one picture at a time. (It stands independently, doesn't use the computer at all). It takes forever, and I'm not using it again. I don't even remember how it works! But if I could turn a whole DVD into individual jpgs in one fell swoop, it would save a lot of trouble and money. I'll look into it.

For those who are advising family conferences, that would be nice if my family all lived around here. Unfortunately, most of them are scattered all over the country. But my son (who does live nearby) came over and took a look, and said the same thing. He was very interested in the pictures of people, especially when my kids and grandkids were very young. He said not to bother with the scenery ones. He offered to help, but doesn't really know how to proceed either. I think you have to be a member of the "slide" generation to even have any interest in this problem.
 
Had a large case of slides from our family travels over the years. When I sold/moved from our family home some years back, my one daughter gladly took them.
She loves to get creative with things like that. … some have been used for family birthday parties, etc. … a few turned into pillow covers.
 
My first question would be, do you know how to use Microsoft Windows, File Explorer, a most basic computer skill?

On Amazon, search with "external usb dvd drive", that will show lots of inexpensive products.

Bought this recently for just $18:

https://www.amazon.com/Rioddas-External-Portable-Rewriter-Superdrive/dp/B07DLRG9VH/ref=sr_1_1_sspa

Given an external USB DVD player, just copying the DVD file folder into one's computer hard drive is simple. Yahoo AI:

Insert the DVD: Place the DVD into your computer's DVD drive.
Open the DVD drive: Locate and open the DVD drive in your file explorer.
Locate the VIDEO_TS folder: Find the folder named "VIDEO_TS" on the DVD.
Copy the folder: Copy the "VIDEO_TS" folder and any other relevant files from the DVD.
Paste to hard drive: Navigate to your desired location on your hard drive and paste the copied files.

Note to be clear, the above does not "burn" a DVD disk that means actually using a player with a laser writer to do so onto an empty new DVD disk. It just puts the files on one's computer one can then run or open whatever is on them just as though they were on a DVD player appliance.

With CD's the same thing. Most players read and write with both DVDs and CDs. With CDs, files can likewise simply be copied from an external USB player using Microsoft Windows, File Explorer.
 
Another thing to consider: If kept in a cool dark environment, the images on those slides could last a very long time and there will always be ways to recover them. Digital copies are subject to obsolescence. And, CD's and flash drives degrade over time and will eventually become unreadable.
 

You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top