35mm Slide Organization Ideas
You've got hundreds or thousands of slides that you want to organize into a beautiful DVD slide show. Where do your start?
First
of all, do you have a working 35mm Slide Projector? If you do, then
you might want to spend hours in a dark room viewing your slides and
picking through them to find the ones that you want to have scanned.
This is not an easy job but many people do it because the end result
is well worth the trouble. It all depends on how much time you have
on your hands. If you don't have a working projector, you probably
already know that Kodak is not even manufacturing the 35mm slide
projectors any longer. You might be able to find a used one at a
Goodwill store or on Ebay but you might be paying a pretty penny for
it and you have no warrantee for how long it will work. There is
also the matter of bulbs burning out and they are not inexpensive.
One
alternative would be to purchase the Pana-Vue Automatic viewer. This
is a lighted viewer that magnifies the slide so that you can see
what it looks like. 2 5/8" square viewing screen. You can stack and
view up to 36 slides at one time. Operates with an easy push-pull
operation. Bright t 4X magnification of the slide. The light turns
on for each slide automatically using 2 "D" sized batteries or
household current with optional transformer.
If you have to go through thousands of slides, it might not be the best way to do it but it is relatively inexpensive at $28.95 from Adorama.com.
Another alternative that many of our customers have chosen is to:
- Send us all the slides, after rotating and stacking them correctly or pay us five cents a slide to do it for you.
- Have us scan them all and send you a DVD data disk or CD with all your images on it separated into folders according to your designated containers.
- You copy the image folders to your Hard Drive on your computer and then use your file manager to view the images as "Thumbnails" and then sort the images into folders that you want to have made into a DVD playable slide show.
- You should remember that the images will sort according to file name and appear that way in your slide show.
- You make a new disk with your sorted and organized images on it and send it back to us.
- We will use your folders of images to create your DVD playable slide show for you and send it to you along with your slides, if you want them back. (After seeing our work, probably half our customers don't even want their slides back. They have no further need of them since they are only fading and deteriorating anyway.)
Another extension of the above solution would be to have us make "Thumbnail Printouts" of your images. That way you would have the sheets right in front of you and it would make it easier for you to see which slides are in which folder. You could write notes on the sheets as reminders of which image should go into which new or different folder. This makes your job a lot easier.
After serving thousands of customers and not having a single unhappy customer, we continue our customer oriented service of trying to help you with your project of transferring your 35mm slides to digital as painless as possible.
One more helpful tip: stay away from the slides of "fireworks." They seldom transfer well and, when it comes right down to it, who cares about a picture of fireworks? Leave these shots to the professional photographer.