Warning! This post could cause death by boredom or maybe brain damage!
I will join this discussion and party. About four years ago I finished scanning several thousand slides taken by my parents. The oldest was from about the mid 1950's, the newest was from about 1986. Here is a cover letter, in part and edited, that I attached to the file that accompanied the scanned photos:
The 35mm transparency slide collection…has been digitized and stored on several hard drives. The aim of this project was to make the viewing of the photos easier; to make them more accessible to family members; and in some cases, to arrest the apparent degradation of some of the slides. The storage of these photos on hard drives should not be considered archival since the lifetime of information on hard drives is considered to be reliable for years, not decades. An effort should be made to renew the photos on new drives every few years. I plan on keeping a copy on a small portable hard drive which will be located in a safe deposit box; as well, I will keep the original copy in my home on a portable external drive.
The equipment used:
Slide Scanner–Nikon LS-5000 with bulk slide feeder SF-210
Scanning Software–Vuescan
(http://www.hamrick.com/)
Organizational Software–Name Dropper (http://www.cognitial.com/namedropper/index.htm
Additional color correction software–IrfanView
(http://www.irfanview.com/)
Each slide was scanned for maximum information up to the limit of the scanner's ability. Each scan yielded two files: a JPEG file that is the "viewing" file and a TIFF file that contains all the information extracted from the slide. The TIFF format was chosen because it is thought to be the best candidate for archiving, i.e., software to handle TIFF files is expected to be available twenty or thirty years from now. The resulting file sizes are huge for the TIFF files but reasonable for the JPEG files (the file sizes are settable when scanning). If someone has a special interest in manipulating an image with software the TIFF file would be the best place to start–make a copy of the TIFF and manipulate the copy, leaving the original alone and untouched. There is readily available software that converts TIFF to JPEG if one wants to follow the example set on this hard drive. The JPEG files are best for everyday viewing.
Note that the TIFF files look very weird when viewed by some software including the Name Dropper software. They look very dark, distorted, cropped, etc. This is normal–do not worry about it.
Many of the older slides when viewed closely have small black dots. I did not try to remove the dots other than to blow several puffs of air onto each surface with a rubber hand- squeeze bulb prior to scanning. All of the slides received the bulb treatment. The non-emulsion sides were cleaned with distilled water and Q-tips as necessary. The Vuescan software was able to reduce the black dots and some defects as viewed on the JPEG files. Irfanview software's "auto adjust colors" was good at restoring color from shadowy areas. The TIFF files are untouched by the software so that they can be manipulated in any fashion from scratch if desired.
Some slides exhibit severe damage due to the "flood". No special effort was made to clean these. Other slides were badly underexposed, overexposed, or poorly focused. No effort was made at culling the poor ones–they were all recorded. A relative few of the slides were scanned for "heavy" infrared dust removal. The vast majority were scanned for "light" dust removal. The "heavy" setting resulted in colors that were less saturated, a tradeoff that was not always desirable.
Each slide is represented by a file name that depicts the film "roll" number, photo number, and date. The suffix .tif or .jpg denotes the file type.
Not all slides were dated by the developer, nor were they all numbered. A best guess was used to assemble the slides in approximate chronological order when these conditions were encountered. Note that the dates represent film development dates and not event or photo subject dates.
A future task could involve labeling the slides with keywords such as locations, better dates, names of people, etc. The Name Dropper software could be useful for this purpose.
This whole project took over three years to complete.
End of cover letter and resuming real time comments.
With the passage of those few years I am forgetting some of the details. Irfan software–don't remember using it but I must have! The Name Dropper software was a huge help in renaming files, streamlining the typing.
The largest part of the project was organizational prior to plugging in the scanner. Many of the slides were in their original packages and marked with a date or some form of the event or location. Many of the slides were in carousels arranged by topic and not chronologically as I desired.
Basically it was like putting together a huge puzzle.
I set up a homemade light table consisting of two fluorescent shop lamps and a piece of plexiglass with the protective milky white plastic cover. Worked great except that my dining room table was unusable for a long time.
This site was helpful in solving part of the puzzle: http://www.zoggavia.com/Kodachrome_Slide_Film.html
It appears that I have a couple other similar sites saved, won't list them unless someone requests (yeah, right!).
After the slides were organized and stored in sleeves within 3-ring binders it was time to think about the storage medium and the file type. For file type I settled on the dual TIFF and jpeg storage as mentioned above; that seemed to be the prevailing wisdom at the time. Perhaps things have changed already. The storage medium was also a tough decision. In ~2007 the experts seemed to think that CD/DVD discs were reliable for just a few years, about the same amount of time as hard drives. I vaguely remember reading recently that they (the discs) are probably good for longer, maybe up to 10 years? Also looked into the "gold" discs. They seemed to be a good option with lifetimes into several decades but I would have needed quite a large stack. Maybe I need to revisit the gold discs one day. Yes, I have computers with hard drives greater than 10 years old and they still work fine, but since we are talking about archiving…………
Mentioned above is the "flood" which inundated some of the slides and caused quite a bit of damage. At one point my mother almost threw them away. So glad she did not because the leftover content still has some value and because the software processing of damaged photos does an AMAZING job of recovery. Along similar lines back in my poorer days I cheaped-out in developing some slides of my 1977 Mt. Rainier climb; many of the slides had a reddish cast and I was disappointed. This past winter I ran them through the scanner and "cleaned" them with the default settings. Wow! They look perfect, no sign of unwanted tones. I am no expert, I merely used the default cleanup settings.
There is still much work to do. My personal slide collection is unscanned sitting there taunting me. It is in much better order and should go quickly once I begin. Maybe this winter.
(I have no connection to any of the companies or vendors listed above).
