Organizing Slides (making it easier for when I'm gone)

This thread ((there was a url link here which no longer exists)/) has inspired me to start looking through my slides and labeling them in some way. I have slides going all the way back to the mid-1980s when I started into "serious photography." I figure this way, when I'm gone the kids can go through the slides and save the ones that interest them, and do something else with the others, whether that is donating to a historical society or (shudder) tossing them in the trash. I try to identify people where possible, otherwise subject and location.

To do this, I've snagged a package of Avery return address labels, 80 to a sheet. These are the 1 3/4 inch by 1/2 inch labels. I use the computer to print the labels, which I then stick on the slides.

An additional thing I'm doing is toss them into the projector tray in what I *think* is the correct orientation for projection, then verify the orientation by projecting them. Once that's done and I know they're all in the correct orientation, I put a red dot on the upper left corner of the slide (when it's turned right for projection). Why upper left instead of upper right? I've got a Vivitar slide projector and a Leitz slide projector. When oriented correctly, upper left is visible when the slide is in the tray correctly for projection, upper right is visible in the tray for the Leitz but not visible in the Vivitar tray. Doing it this way, it's easy to see at a glance if the slides are oriented correctly for projection in either tray!

I'm not sure the labels are a great idea. If the adhesive fails when the slides are in the projectors, you could end up with a real mess.

It is a truly boring alternative to write a code on the mount and then reference the code on a sheet of paper, but I think it may be safer.

If you were using Kodak Carousels, I would also definitely recommend against slides with adhesive labels and the 140 trays.

If it's at all practical and your script or printing is legible, your descendants would most appreciate handwritten notations.

I've thought about just writing on the slide mounts, but while my writing is reasonably good, it's generally not very small. I could get away with writing a code on the slide, but who's gonna cross reference it with a sheet of paper in 40 years?

ME Super said:

I've thought about just writing on the slide mounts, but while my writing is reasonably good, it's generally not very small. I could get away with writing a code on the slide, but who's gonna cross reference it with a sheet of paper in 40 years?

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Archaeologists?

Actually, I wish my Dad had done just that, because then I'd have a lot more information to work with.

And thats with respect to 40 year old slides.

Mate, if the slides are worth keeping, then it's worth the effort.

I mean, you are already up for endless hours of effort, so why not do it properly?

My system is a fairly simple one. I number slide boxes with a code identifying year-month-date (the latter, if possible, not always easy with images taken in the 1970s-1980s, unless of course the slides were processed by Kodak and auto-date stamped) and then a number, the last basically to identify the box - like 2016_05_23_XXX.

I then set up a computer document and type as much information as I am able to remember from the slides.

With some planning and a little mental discipline, you should be able to easily do from two to five slide boxes in an evening. I tend to work on this project every second evening, for an hour or two hours, and then give myself a day's break to let my brain cells refresh themselves.

It also helps to set aside those slides you intend to work on during your next session, and look at them. This also activates the brain cells. You will be surprised what memories you will get before the session.

In the 1980s and 1990s many photographers unwisely threw out their Kodak (and other processors') slide boxes in favor of plastic sleeves. For the most part, my slides stored in such sleeves for longer than, say, ten years, now all show some deterioration. Yet some Agfa slides I have of images taken in Bali in 1970 show almost no color shift at all. A miracle, this. Of course I've scanned these images long ago.

Kodak plastic slide boxes sometimes turn up in charity shops. When you find them, grab and buy them all. Ebay sellers think the Kodak yellow is gold, and tend to price them accordingly.

Try not to overthink all this or set up needlessly complex numbering systems. Devote your time more to compiling your memories of the images. Involve your partner or other family members in the memory process, they may recall things you have forgotten. Your descendants will thank you for it in future. Believe me. I did when I had to sort out my late dad's photo archive. He was an anthropologist and shot heaps in his lifetime, and he also set up the system I now use. Bless him for it.

True, I suppose I could get more info in a database or a piece of paper. The advantage with a database is that it's searchable. The disadvantage is that you have to have the software to be able to open the database. I think that's where open-source software like OpenOffice would come in handy. The advantage with the piece of paper is that you need no software, just your eyes and maybe a couple lenses to correct vision deficiencies. The disadvantage to paper is that it's difficult to search.

Or as one of my fellow computer science friends used to say, "It's hard to grep dead trees" (for the uninitiated, "grep" is a Unix/Linux search tool, and we all know paper is made from dead trees).

I still stand by my system of putting a red dot in the upper left corner of the slide (when oriented correctly for projection) to indicate correct orientation for projection, though. That alone saves tons of time when loading a tray!

ME Super said:

I still stand by my system of putting a red dot in the upper left corner of the slide (when oriented correctly for projection) to indicate correct orientation for projection, though

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I agree, as long as you use a red felt pen, rather than a stick on dot.

Maybe include a small, simple battery-operated slide viewer with the collection. You'd be surprised how many folks nowadays do not own such a device, and I think even fewer people will in years to come.

I've been off work for the holidays (I go back Monday, January 9th, as I took a few vacation days to make my time off line up with my son's time off from school), and I've been working on this problem. I've created a small database using MySQL and a little quick-n-dirty Windows Forms application using .NET 4.5. My application solves the following problems:

1. Allows relatively easy entry of a roll of photos into the database, using basic CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) operations.
2. Photos include roll ID, Frame #, Description, and optional fields: Path to a scan, exposure info, date, notes, and searchable "tags" so that (provided user enters meaningful tags) it's easy to find photos on a given topic.
3. Photos can be attached to a slide show, so once a slide show is created and entered into the system, it'll become easy to recreate it from the info in the database.
4. All the information is exportable into an Excel spreadsheet, which hopefully will be easily printable. Don't have Excel? That's OK, OpenOffice.org can open Excel files, and IIRC it's open source too!

Once I have the program a bit more polished, I plan to put the source on GitHub so anybody with an Internet connection and Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition (or newer - Microsoft gives away the Community Edition - yeah it's free) can download the source code and use the application. Anybody interested?

Now, I just have to start going through my slides and getting codes on them, and getting the data into the database. That'll be the hard part!

MattKing said:

... as long as you use a red felt pen, rather than a stick on dot.

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I completely share this view!

Good luck!

ozmoose said:

Kodak plastic slide boxes sometimes turn up in charity shops. When you find them, grab and buy them all. Ebay sellers think the Kodak yellow is gold, and tend to price them accordingly.

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Why not put them in the appropriate trays and these in the appropriate boxes. All even still available from the manufacturer.

If a serial number of the roll of film is added to the number that most processors printed or stamped on the slide mount, each slide has a unique number that can be catalogued any way one wants. If the catalogue is available on a computer, a word search can pinpoint all slides with that subject matter.

Most of my slides were from vacations and stuff like that that no one is going to look out years from now or to a small degree. So I scanned samples of all and am making DVD slide shows and giving them to my daughter and others. The rest are being thrown out. I have made prints of some and given them to family and those will at least be looked out -maybe. Another advantage is that the prints especially ones put in frames might be mounted on their walls and put on furniture to be looked out now and passed along to future generations.

Frankly I doubt if anyone would have looked at thousands of uninteresting slides in the future. I mean just how many pictures of ourselves, trees, mountains, statues and other common and uninteresting things will people want to see? It's our egos that make us think we're that important.

I always used the top right back for the dot, which (after much experimenting with cute rubber stamps) I make with a new pencil's eraser and rubber stamp pad.

I do a serial number for each slide with a coded year and roll number then 1 to 36. Information per roll is written into a database, but it's time to update the platform... Computers change so rapidly that it's hard to maintain the app written in Visual FoxPro... and designed for a 640x480 screen.

I went to all that trouble for slides, then took a foray into black and white and didn't design a system that could be used for both.

Jim Jones said:

If a serial number of the roll of film is added to the number that most processors printed or stamped on the slide mount, each slide has a unique number that can be catalogued any way one wants. If the catalogue is available on a computer, a word search can pinpoint all slides with that subject matter.

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Exactly. The unique identifier is a roll # + frame #. Tags just make searching easier.

A friend of mine who is more of a "family" than a "hobby" photographer, in the pre-digital time, went through each of her (lab-processed) films, discarded the negatives and poorer prints and put the remainder in albums with appropriate captions. Similarly she now prints only any good digital shots and deletes the remainder. She fills no more than one small album for each year.
Being a bit of a hoarder myself, I was a bit shocked to think of throwing out any negatives or prints, but, as she says, no one wants to see 100's of holiday (or any other) shots, and those of the family with dates and information are the ones which will be of interest in the future. And I found that I couldn't argue with this approach !