One of the problems that many photographers (both pro and amateur) have is that over the course of the past 20 years there have been major changes, especially in the shift from film to digital formats. As a result, a lot of use have boxes of old slides that we cannot view. If you want to show off your photos on social media, you have to get your pics into your computer somehow.
The solution is, of course, to scan your slides. You can do it yourself, if you have the right technology, or you can use a service and have it done for you.
Let’s take a moment to talk about do-it-yourself scanning. You will need a slide scanner. There are any number on the market, so some window shopping is required to find the one that works for you.
If you have only a few slides to digitize, a simple slide scanner will do the trick. The basic models have a slide holder that you put your slide into, and manually push them through the machine. You click a button on screen to digitize the photo.
More elaborate scanners will pull the holder through automatically and digitize the image without much help from you. Very nice, but a bit more expensive.
Really top-drawer scanners allow you to insert a “stack” of slides, sometimes a LOT of slides, and the entire process is automated. If you have a large quantity of slides, and deep pockets, this the is way to go.
In my case, I use a simple scanner with a 5-slide holder. I push them through the machine by hand and the software processes my photos, turning them into the format of my choice.
It is not particularly fast, but it does nice work. Besides, it cost less than $100 when I purchased it.
The photo here was taken in the 1980s on Kodak Ektachrome 35mm film. It was digitized using my scanner and color corrected (slides often have a color shift with age) in Photoshop, I think it looks pretty good.