Home Forums Gear Photography Old hunting slides, best way to convert to digital

I have my family’s old photos, there are a couple thousand of them in 35mm Color slides. They seem to be in good shape but they are from the 50’s, up to about the early 90’s. I’d like to scan them myself and convert them to digital, .jpeg or something.

Does anybody here have any advise to accomplish this? I am aware of several scanning devices that can do this, but I’m hoping someone can offer advise based on personal experience with one of these devices.

We have the Kodak SCANZA that did a good job.
Simple, straightforward operation.
You will be busy for a while doing that many.
Not the cheapest, but seems to cover most of the basis of stills.

A dedicated slide scanner. Not one of the boxes that sits atop the typical flatbed scanner. Also, for the best images, remove them from the cardboard mounts, sandwich them in glass mounts, and then do the scan. In their original form, they are not flat, and one will have in and out of focus regions in his digital images. Last, scan at the highest resolutions possible and save as tif files.

I had read about their services a few years ago, but have not used them. I have several carousels of slides from backpacking trips in the 80s
https://www.scancafe.com/

Costco used to do them very reasonably but they've closed many of their photo services, maybe all of them.

do a little research on them and try a wanted ad in the classifieds, can't hurt.

When I got back from Viet Nam and the surrounding countries, and the next few years hunting and backpacking I realized that to show my slides I had to use a projector and screen and I basically quit taking slides until I bought my first DSLR and then, I found several ways to copy slides to my computer. One of the ways was a slide copier mounted to my camera (one at a time). Then I downloaded my pics from the camera to the computer. After 100's of slides , I saw advertised, the slide copiers that hooked up to the computer and you could copy slides or photos directly to the computer and edit them first on the box, and later on the computer. There was a slide holder that held 4 slides at at a time or one photograph at a time. Most of the slides were taken in 1967 thru 1970 so were in pretty rough shape but I was able to save most of them and of course when I quit using my Asahi Pentax. SLR & also quit copying slides. I still have hundreds of slides of the rest of the years to copy.
The slide copier I have. I bought from Adorama in the 90's and I be trying it again soon (for approx. 150 slides)
My copier is The Image Box Plus and I see that there is one similar still on google search. I paid around $100.00 for it.
I do still have the single slide copier that attaches to your camera if I can find it---I see those are still available also. Attached are two pics taken in Ubon Thailand in 1968 & copied from the slides approx 45 years later.
Ken
The box I use attaches to the computer via USB cord. Also, my older brother copied hundreds of Yellowstone Park slides on his flatbed computer that came out real good. But, I think there are some good comercial places that do slides much faster and some probably better!