My darling boy only ever took slides and we ended up with a huge number of them. The collection contains everything you would expect – family events, holidays, house, garden, pets, overseas trips, and clouds – lots and lots of clouds, all taken through plane windows. The grand plan was that on retirement he would scan them all, sort, cull and do something with those that remained. He did a lot of research on scanners and we acquired a Canon CanoScan 9900F which would scan 16 slides at a time.

I could go on about what happened next and why but suffice it to say that I ended up doing the scanning and now he has 5,600 slides ready to sort, cull and do something with.  They’ve been ready for about 12 years. So now I’m thinking maybe I should sort, cull … myself.

Scanning slides is mind numbingly boring so I did scan a lot of them at lower than the maximum possible resolution to speed things up.  My idea was that during the sorting and culling the best slides would be identified and those could be scanned again using optimal settings.  I did say I scanned them about 12 years ago.  Scanners have improved since then.  But sadly the slides may have deteriorated further.

But what is life without a challenge!

Here’s a link to an article about scanning slides  (link opens in a new tab) posted in 2012 by Joe Hoover, the Digital Technology Outreach Specialist for the Minnesota Historical Society that I will definitely come back to.

Clouds over Kuching 1997