Creating a process for digitizing slides

I mentioned in a past post that I was going to start my picture wrangling process with slides. My father, great uncle and husband developed most of their pre-digital era pictures as slides. I have fond memories of  my dad setting up the old slide projector and screen in the living room for a family slide show. It turns out that one reason for developing their photos as slides is that transmissive media such as slides and negatives are much higher resolution than print photos. I will explain what that means and why it matters in my next post. For now, the important thing is that they will produce better quality digital pictures than the prints will (mostly) and they are somewhat better organized which makes it easier for me to put a dent in my mountain of family photos.

The collected slides - my starting place

After weeding through most, though probably not all, of my stashed boxes of pictures, I have isolated the two Rubbermaid totes and an old cardboard box of slides that you see above. I have also worked to set up a dedicated workspace on my dining room table.  Which will be convenient until we have guests but I will cross that bridge later.  

The Set Up 

I have an old laptop that I am dedicating to this project connected to the photo scanner, an overhead ring light and a magnifier to allow me to preview slides and hopefully set aside those that are duplicates or of poor quality.  The ring light set up was an Amazon purchase and cost me about $30. 

It has a bracket for holding a phone camera for lighted overhead pictures.  The focusing loupe provides up to 10X magnification and cost about $10.  If you have access to an old light box or slide reviewer, you may find it equally as satisfactory.  I do like the light and magnifier because I can easily see the dust and flaws on the slide which would not be as visible on the light box or viewer.

Another thing I am committed to is rigorously tossing any slides that have subjects I just don't care about.  That might be people I can't identify that are not family members, pictures of random places that I am not connected to or things that I simply don't know what their significance is.  I have a couple of plastic bins set up on the table to receive the pictures I am finished scanning and another to receive the ones I plan to throw out.  

Dust blaster, lint free wipes and vinyl gloves 

Other things to have handy include gloves to prevent getting finger prints on the photos, lint free wipes for wiping away smudges as needed and a dust blaster.  The dust blaster is for blowing off dust particles before scanning.  I have learned that I can save myself a great deal of time and trouble if I take these steps before scanning since almost invisible dust and smudges can result in pictures that need quite a bit of editing time or rescanning.  Where possible, I hope to prevent making things any harder than they have to be.

Flatbed Photo Scanner

I have tried to minimize the amount of money I invest in my little photo project but a good quality photo scanner seemed essential.  I described the little film scanner that my father used to start scanning his slides and it is adequate for pictures that I don't intend to enlarge or use on a high definition screen.  But the resolution of the film scanner is only 24 megapixels while the resolution of the flatbed scanner is much higher.  

When shopping for a scanner we selected the Epson Perfection V600 Photo Scanner on the basis of it's moderate cost and good reviews.  In order to scan slides or negatives, brackets that hold the media in place are provided and the cover of the scanner can be modified to allow light to pass through them.  Up to four slides at a time can be held in the bracket and scanned.

The Epson Perfection V600 undergoing inspection

The plastic shield at the top is removed for scanning slides & negatives.

It reveals a window that allows light to pass through the media for scanning.

The bracket holds the slides in place.

This is a pretty efficient set up for processing many slides in one sitting.  Now I just have to make it happen!

Set a Deadline to Finish

Since I am a bit of a procrastinator I will set a target date for finishing this phase of the project with some monthly reminders on my calendar.  I will report back!

Dad's Air Force pictures (1954-1957)

 

My father, Charles R Kuhlemeier, on the lower left.  The picture is labeled 55U Cadet Class Lackland, Malden, Enid

Well, I started the process of uploading my father’s photolibrary to Flickr.  In about 2005 he retired and was trying to manage all the slides and family photos he had collected (I think I see a pattern here!).  My husband and I made a deal that we would buy a film scanner and loan it to him long term.  At that point in our lives we had no time to do anything with it ourselves.  That was one of the best things we ever did.  Over the next few years, Daddy scanned and labeled a couple of thousand pictures using that little film scanner.  I can’t say how much I appreciate the work he did.  I have countless pictures of elders with names that I never met on both sides of my family and without those, I could not hope to label most of our old family photos.  There are pictures of vacations that we took as small children, our homes in California and Michigan, birthday parties and girl scout activities.  They are all precious to me and they give me a baseline for identifying many others as yet undiscovered.

That little film scanner, by the way, was obsolete technology by the time we were ready to use it.  I think the software that supported it couldn’t be updated so we replaced it.  I still have the replacement and have used it quite a bit.  We also purchased a flatbed photo scanner that is capable of scanning slides and negatives.  I now know that the resolution of the flatbed scanner is vastly superior to that of the film scanner so I will be judicious about using the little guy in the future.

I began by uploading about 500 of my father’s pictures from his days in the Air Force. 

Cadet parking lot Vance AFB '54 Dees (?) -  love this because of all the cars!

Charles Kuhlemeier in a B52 at Selfridge AFB

He went through basic training at Lackland AFB in San Antonio TX (1954), pilot training at Malden AFB in Missouri and was stationed in Salina KS with the Strategic Air Command (SAC) where he met my mother. There are pictures of many different bases that he flew from but Vance AFB in Enid appears in many pictures.

Guard gate at Vance AFB

While they were engaged, he spent time stationed in Reading, England (1957).  The pictures from those few months are definitely some of the most beautiful.  He told stories about visiting homes in post-war England and thinking that he was going to freeze.  My dad was raised in Michigan and experienced many very cold winters there, but the coal shortage made fueling coal burners in England difficult and expensive so homes were frigid, even by Michigan standards.  Another lingering memory was a poor opinion of English cuisine, especially overcooked steaks which he took a very dim view of.  When he and Mom got married, he decided against a career in the Air Force but did continue in the Air Reserves for a few years.  He loved flying and I think did regret not continuing as a commercial pilot.

Market on the square Newbury 1956

Many photos in flight

"Kuhlemeier studying" 

Love the caption on this one "Probably not a crew member"

I have not been able to locate anything to confirm that I remember this correctly, but I believe that the air show in Oklahoma City was narrated by Colonel (later Brigadier General) Jimmy Stewart.

OKC air show guests - Patsy, a cousin of Mom's, Mary Lee Byrne, her friend from OU Nursing, Mom and her sister Juanita.

From that same show, there are pictures of John Glenn setting a speed record for a cross country flight.  I know my dad admired Jimmy Stewart tremendously and mentioned that narration many times.  I need to put my librarian skills to work and dig a bit.  I doubt I dreamed this!

Navy Crusaders and John Glenn OKC air show 1956

I have lingered quite a bit with these pictures.  The fact that he spent so much time adding names, places and aircraft models to each photo, is a reflection of how much he loved flying and how important that time in his life was. It was also fun to see his sense of humor shine through on some of the picture captions.  I don’t know enough about aircraft to appreciate all the finer points but seeing my dad looking so young and handsome gives me a lot of pleasure.  I hope that others in our family and beyond will also appreciate them. 

Grandma Henry

A very belated tribute to my grandmother.  I wrote this in April 2009 and it has been sitting in a file waiting to be shared.

Great Grandma Buchanan, me as a baby and Grandma Henry

Grandma Henry as a young mother with my mother Wilma

Me, Great Grandma Buchanan and Grandma Henry in front of the lilacs at the side of her house in Enid, OK.

My Grandmother Henry died last Christmas, just a couple weeks short of her 95^th birthday.  For several years she had lived in a nursing home, where she gradually got smaller and frailer and less able to get around.  Her mind began to take excursions to other places that weren’t always happy, apparently in search of resolution of earlier pains and wrongs.  When family members would come visit her, she could often surprise us by willfully pulling back to a completely aware present, with wit and insight intact.  But you never knew.  It was also possible to find her fretting over her husband spending the night with some floozy or her grandson selling drugs right outside her window.  The irony being that these things were terrible injustices to my grandfather, who was a rock of love and faithfulness though their long marriage, and to my cousin, whose long distance activities were occasionally irresponsible but a long way from the nefarious things she began to attribute to him.  By the time she died I had begun to pray that an angel would come at night to gather her up in his arms and take her to reunite with the husband she had lost some thirty years before and the son who died about the same time, much too young.  It was a much happier vision than that of the shadow living in her much reduced body.  I could write an entire book about her.  She was not only the matriarch of our family but a strong, no nonsense woman who never quit being compassionate and interested in those around her.  The CNA's in the nursing home would come to fluff her blankets, but mostly to tell her their problems because she was always a listening ear. 

I miss her terribly and find that I grieve for her almost daily in small ways.  She had been only an occasional part of my west coast childhood, but she had played a solid, comforting role in my adulthood since she lived close enough to be able to celebrate holidays with and to be present for the small and large celebrations of my young family.  Today, I found myself thinking of her as I planted the pots of flowers that will border my patio.  I caught myself correcting the label on the plastic pots from the discount store that read “moss rose”.  “That’s not right, it should be rosy moss!” I said to myself.  Because that is what Grandma called it and it grew in the margins of her flower beds at the back of her little house.  When I visited her she would take me on a guided tour to see what was blooming, what had to be divided and what she had put in the ground after cultivating it in the pot all winter long.  She had a fabulous green thumb, mostly the product of the joy she received from growing things and her careful interest in the successes and failures of each year’s garden.  I also pay a small tribute whenever I make her banana bread or vegetable soup recipe; when I use one of the tea towels that she embroidered or when I do an all-too-hasty job of wrapping a gift while remembering the beautiful, creative packages she used to wrap for us all every Christmas.  She was the product of another era, with an eighth grade formal education, but she never lost her interest in learning new things, her willingness to have an adventure or her almost infinite capacity to love and care for those around her.  I hope that I can have the same kind of influence on those around me that she did in all those small but important ways.

Getting started!

Okay, it's time to get serious.  If I don't get started with digitizing and archiving the mountain of family photos I am hording, I won't live long enough to get through them.  Well, it's likely I won't anyway just because of the sheer number!

Not mine but a better organized approximation of the picture jumble I need to get through.

So my plan is to use the workflow from the book, "Declutter Your Photo Life", starting with the Gather phase.  

See the post on workshop resources for information about purchasing this book.

I have decided to separate the slides from the other photo types partly because my father began our archive with slides and partly because I recognize that they are likely to be the highest quality pictures to save. One of my challenges is that my father scanned many, many but never disposed of them. I learned that slides should be scanned at a resolution of 1000 ppi.  Because he scanned them with a film scanner with much lower resolution, I want to check to see if any of the pictures should be rescanned at the higher resolution so that I can enlarge and print them.  I have at least one shoebox sized plastic box with his slides to go through and it's likely there are others that are underneath the piles.  Sigh.

Deciding on an online photo service for my archive

I have read several reviews that compare the features of different services, including this one from 2023.  I am currently using Google Photos.  There are some features I really like about it including the ease of transferring pictures from my phone, the shared albums and the timeline that makes it easy to locate pictures according to the year they were taken.  It also features facial recognition for organizing and a robust search tool.  Since I exceeded the storage available at the free tier (5 GB) last year I committed to paying for 100 GB.  The cost is nominal at $29.99 /year but the 100 GB includes storage for my Gmail and a Google drive that I have used for both personal and work purposes.  First of all, I believe that at the time I subscribed it was $19.99 per year.  I could be wrong about that but the cost inevitably goes up.  Since I also have to monitor the storage used for mail and other things, it is a challenge to add the photo storage on top of that.  I really want to monitor and minimize the costs for storage.  Google also has the advantage of  longevity.  It's important to consider that if I choose another service to reduce the cost and it goes out of business in a couple of years, I could lose all the work I have put in organizing photos.

After some reading and consideration of these factors, I have decided to set my archive up in Flickr.  I even did a trial to see how difficult it was to upload and organize pictures.  It was very straightforward and the free subscription will allow me to upload 1000 pictures before I have to commit to a paid subscription.  The paid subscription is $72/year and it allows unlimited photos so it will cost less than my current Google account and the cost will not be dependent on the number of photos.  A survey of the site assures me that it is used by many professional photographers and the album and organizing features are quite comparable to those of Google Photos.  I haven't explored facial recognition so I don't know whether I will forfeit that feature or not. I have also found that it is possible to label each photo with the privacy control to allow it to be "public", "private - friends" or "private - family", a feature I will really appreciate since I want to be able to make pictures of my young grandchildren available to family but no one else. In addition, I have the ability to limit who can search for, share, download and use my photos.  In the future if I choose to, I can share select photos with a Creative Commons license that indicates how I want the pictures used and who should get credit for them.  My librarian's heart loves this!

Here is a link to my first efforts on Flickr.

Thanks for sharing this part of the journey!

About this blog and me.

After my parents died and I inherited the entire family archive of photos and documents, I realized that I had many questions but no one to ask.  My hope is that I can collect as many of the stories that my parents and grandparents told as possible for my own children and grandchildren.  I have also taken on the challenge of trying to share my journey managing all these things, especially photos, with the idea that others are at least as overwhelmed as I am.  With my background as a librarian and a data person, I should be better prepared than most to do something about it, though.

Memorial Day in Enid, OK
Me decorating family graves

So this blog will allow me to share both what I have gleaned from research and reading about managing photos and family information and some of my own experiences.  I admit that it is generally pretty self-serving.  My first and foremost goal is to get my own house in order.  I hope others can benefit and share things they have learned, too.  I will intersperse the pedantic stuff with interesting family stories, some of which were written by my father and grandmother and some that are my retelling of the oral stories that were never captured in print.

I will also include information shared at a three week workshop I am conducting this summer of 2023.  I plan on updating it as time allows.

Thanks for reading and please contribute any helpful suggestions in the comments!

Workshop Resources

A list of resources

Book recommendation

An excellent, up to date source that describes a well thought out process for managing your photos.  The author is a professional photographer who makes recommendations for a range of software and technologies.

Workshop slides

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• • Link to Week 1 slides  - this will take you to a website where the slides are saved.  Click the three dots on the upper right hand side and select Download to save them to your computer or print them.
  • Link to Week 2 slides - You can access the tutorial video about using the slide scanner here.
  • Link to Week  3 slides

Websites

• To create a shared album on your iPhone, you can use the photo app on the phone. On Android devices you can download the Google Photos app to share albums.
  This site provides step by step instruction about how to use albums and folders on iPhone.  PC Magazine is also a very reliable source for tech info.  Here is an article from PC Magazine with more general information about managing photos on iPhone.
• In the search for equal time, here is the help center for Android phones with instructions on how to organize photos using Gallery.  It has some confusing information about whether you have to download the Gallery app or if it is already loaded on Android devices.  It may depend on which generation of phone you have.
• Tom's Guide "The best photo storage and sharing sites in 2023" - tom's guide is a technology review blog.  This article compares the top 11 photo sites with information about cost, advantages and reasons to avoid in each case.  Flickr is the top rated site but number 2 on the list is 500px, a service I had not heard of.  This site is a good place to start if you are trying to determine which service will be the best choice for your needs.

Supplies (not intended as an endorsement of these vendors)

• Photo albums and scrapbooks - Pioneer Photo Albums, Inc. offers over 300 styles of albums, as well as refill pages and photo supplies. "Pioneer uses only quality, archival materials in manufacturing, ensuring our products are photo safe: acid, lignin and PVC emission free. Pioneer offers many patented products including memo photo albums that feature optically clear plastic slip-in pockets and durable washable covers...."  Pioneer products are available through Amazon.
• B&H Photo and Video is a large supplier of equipment and accessories for photographers and videographers.  A good online source for air blaster dust removers and lens tissues.  
• Archival Methods, as the name implies, is a supplier for archival quality materials of all kinds including photo boxes, pages for three ring binders and a variety of storage solutions.