Question about restoring and digitizing slides from the 1950's

by caseymustach

Hi /r/AskHistorians! Maybe you can help me out.

My great grandmother passed away a couple years ago, and when my family and I were collecting her things, we came across 6 boxes full of slides from their travels to Ethiopia and Egypt in the 1950s. I have well over 1000 slides, and I am looking for a way to make a digital library of them to share with the rest of my family. What is the most cost-effective way to do this? Is there a scanning device that you would recommend?

The slides look like this: http://immortels.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/DSCN4799.jpg

Thank you!

link0007

If you have a bit of a DIY-spirit try this approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnvhBXQrfzQ

Much cheaper than getting it done professionally; you probably know someone with a good camera + macrolens, and a slide projector is easily obtained for like $20 secondhand.

Otherwise you have two options:

  1. filter, filter and filter some more to get only the top 50 slides, and let those get scanned professionally
  2. spend a butload of money or time to scan them all, only to realize you will never look at all 1000 of them :)