What would be the cheapest and most efficient way to share a quantity of 35mm slides among several people?

Sadly, I think the efficient ways to do this kind of thing are expensive and the cheap ways to do it are inefficient. Not sure you can get both.

You might want to check out this link comparing different methods of transferring slides and “analog” images to digital.

Depending on how many slides you actually have, I have probably a thousand, my dad was a big slide guy, I might load them all into carousels and project them, quickly, maybe on or two seconds per slide and take video of that. People will probably be able to tell from that what they want. I don’t think you have to worry too much about the labels. You can reference that after people decide what they want and you will have the originals if there is some interest later.

Then you just take the slides people are interested in, hopefully a relatively small subset of them, and digitize them.

I was under the impression there are scanners that will read slides and accompanying softwear that will convert to jpg. @lillycoyote have you not heard of that??? I will have to research further. I think many of our generation will be facing this dilemma.

@rooeytoo Yes, the technology you are talking about is available, of course, it’s just that I don’t think that the methods available are both cheap and efficient. I’m not sure which one of us is confused but I wasn’t suggesting that @Jeruba take video of the “slide show” as a means of duplicating the images, just as means of providing a quick way for her and her family members to view the hundreds images on the slides and decide which ones they might want copied. Other than that you have to make contact sheets that will only provide very small images or have everyone look through the slides one by one or just go ahead and have all the slides transferred to digital.

There are two ways to do it:
I have done both.
The costly way is to go to a reputable Camera store (one in my area) and they will be able to send them out and 3 weeks later you will have a DVD of the images to do with as you please. It will be able to be a slideshow and you will have high quality digital images.

The second way is slow and tedious, but you can do it yourself if you invest in a scanner that supports slides. Brookstone is where I got mine.
Now you have your own images and can do what you wish.

@blueiiznh So, maybe I was right? You have actually done this and @Jeruba‘s wish for a way that is both cheap and efficient may not be possible? I wish I had better news for her but I’m thinking that’s the way it is.

The scanners for slides are pretty cheap. Under 100 bucks for a good enough one. It is tedious but you don’t need to do them all in a day. Once you scan a slide and have it as jpg it is trivial to burn 4 copies.

Either you can try and find a service that will do that (not a bad idea but probably pricey) or you can, as you said, do them on your own. I converted all of my great aunt’s slides (about 2,400) to DVD last summer using a slide scanner (scans one at a time, saves as a picture) and it took a VERY long time. It was certainly a lot of work, but I think it was worth it.

I was thinking of a preview—a way to let each sibling see what’s there and zero in on the ones they’re interested in so they can just get real scans of those. Maybe there’s really no halfway measure—although video-recording a slide show is very clever and might be the ticket.

We have a scanner that will do about a dozen slides at once, and maybe that’s the answer. I was hoping to avoid having to do all that handling.

Any idea what the cost would be if we sent them out?

I have a collection of slides going back to the 1960’s and I digitised them a couple of years ago. I went through them first picking out the best of them and then I got a photographers to convert them to DVD. It wasn’t too expensive as I had reduced the numbers quite a bit and I was able to distribute the electronic copies to family members.

Just a thought but I wonder if you could put the slides into clear folders and photograph them against the light. You can get a lot of slides on each photograph hopefully with enough detail for people to choose the ones they want.

I wish you lived closer, @Jeruba. We have a special scanner for just such things. Hubby is seriously into his analogue photography. His model is quite expensive, but if you live in the US, something like this might be something to look at:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B001DCGMR4?tag=cheap.cartridge.hp-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0028214L2?tag=pe16.xerox.printer.toner.price-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=B0028214L2&adid=1D4FQ25AZ6EH8551D4C6&

It scans at a decent resolution and file size…. You may have to burn them off your drive as you go, depending on how many you have.

Instead of a video, why not just project the slides and take a digital picture of each one?

I had/have a similar situation. I recently purchased an iMac and it came with a photo application (iPhoto) that has a facial recognition feature that is a tremendous help with this task.

The first step is getting them into a digital format. Most 1 hour photo places have automated systems that will do this for you for a reasonable price. Next step is to do the facial recognition thing. The application first goes through your entire collection and picks out every face (and I mean every face including the ones in picture frames on the wall of some photos). You then start attaching names to the faces and it starts to help you out by guessing at the identity of faces in other photographs that are similar to its baseline picture. It’s not 100%, but does a pretty darned good job and at the end of the process you can do really cool things like create “smart albums” with search criteria something like “Show me all pictures between the dates of X and Y with <whoever> in them”. This is a huge help in organizing your photos.

In addition it has an excellent slide show feature that lets you create presentations that are a couple of notches above your average deck of pictures type slide show. If you want to see a sample of a slide show created in this way, I took a bunch of slides as well as fading prints that my mom and dad took on a trip to Copper Canyon to visit the Tarahumara indians in the late 1960’s (just after the railroad went in). Technically, they were missionaries, but that’s another story. Anyway, here is the video I did with the iPhoto app and a chunk of vintage images if you care to take a look as an example of what you can do with this app. It is important to note that the whole “photo montage” look is done by the application, not by spreading the pictures out and shooting video. In reality each image is a plain old borderless digital picture just like any other. There are several other themes to choose from. Creating the whole presentation took a grand total of about an hour (if that long).

@YoBob The trick is getting them into a digital format in the first place.

According to my darling wife (a photo technician at a one-hour photo place) doing more than a roll’s worth of slides is time-consuming and tedious enough that they charge accordingly. Slides don’t load themselves right-side-up and often don’t load themselves at all.

Unfortunately, no matter which way you go about it, the first step will be some poor person loading the slides one by one into some sort of machine. Now, if you get them digitally scanned to a DVD full of JPEG files then there are at least a thousand different programs you can use to browse the entire collection and choose which ones you want. It is also simple enough to make a copy of said DVD that my cat could almost do it. (I say “almost” since loading the disc into the tray requires thumbs.)

Once they are on a disc, you can do damn near anything with ease. It is a hassle to scan them all in in the first place, but the pay-off is that once you do it, so many other things become so damn simple.

You could get your own slide scanner or you could pay someone else to do it. In the latter case, I have yet to see a price of less than $0.29/slide and most are a little higher ($0.32–0.39) so depending on the size of your collection, you may be much better off getting your own slide scanner and doing it yourself, even if it means learning how to hook the thing up and use it. I will leave the cost/convenience balance for you to decide.

@jerv well played, sir, and good information.

I’ll reiterate that for purposes of selection it might be best to mount the slides in one or more carousels and to project them in a room with a digital camera on a tripod. There might even be a way to trigger the camera from the projector’s frame advance, but that’s an exercise for advanced students. It’s easy enough to hit the button on a digital camera and make a CD or DVD for the sibs.

School is almost out. How about hiring a child who is detail-oriented to take on the task? It might be even easier if there were two. One would load the slides into the contraption while it downloads on the computer, and the second would label the image once it is uploaded.