bigcat1967

To digitize your old slides by yourself or have a company scan them for you and your family is the question. The answer is basically simple. If you digitize all the slides yourself - you’ll have to go out and buy an expensive scanner, learn how to hook it up to your computer system, then installing a driver so that it will communicate between the scanner and computer, and then take many hours scanning slides in.  Then after that, you will then have to buy a $600 photo editor (preferably Photoshop) to alter and sharpen the image. That’s way to much work for one person to do, not to mention the enormous cost of everything.  I believe that if I still had my slides hanging around the house, I would take them to a Slide Scanning Service that can digitize my slides for a reasonable price.

So where should you take your slides to be digitized?  Wal-Mart or a local photo shop can digitize slides, but that isn’t their specialty. I don’t want to blow a whole bunch of money of where it probably won’t be done right in the first place. So the answer is - anyone company can digitize you photos - but that raises another question - who can do it the right way? You’ll have to do a little research on the internet to find the answer.

Just bring up Google on the internet. Type in “scanning service reviews”. This will show you different reviews written by various people that may have had good or bad experiences with scanning companies. This is great way to find good companies.

Once you find which companies are good or bad, you might want to write down the bad companies as a reminder.  Next you will want to go to Google again and type in “slide scanning service”. There are many companies out there that you can ship your slides to that can digitize your slides to cd or DVD.

Once you find the company that you are comfortable with, go to their website and download an order form and write how many slides you want digitized to images.  If there are any questions that you have, be sure to call them. They should have a 1-800 telephone number. Next, you will have to get your old slides ready for shipping.  Companies prefer that you can go through each slide with a lint-free cloth and wipe them clean. Also, make sure they are in a specific order that you want. For an example, you may have slides of two different vacations or events you took in 1985 and also in 1986. Separate the two groups and let the company know that you want them organized in a specific order on the CD or DVD. You don’t want to have a bunch of digitized slides mixed together, not knowing when  the pictures were taken. So make sure you organize your slides before you ship them.

Once they are organized in the order you want them, ship the slides to the company of your choice. If you are in a rush, you can usually call the business and ask them if they can have them back to you by a certain date. Most places do have a rushed service to anyone that need their slides back quickly.

When your slides arrive at the place of business that will digitize slides, these companies have very expensive equipment that can digitize slide collections of your slides to almost perfection.

Once the slides digitized, companies will then download them to a CD (or Cds - depending on how many slides you may have) in the order that you have asked. They should be shipped back once they are finished (unless payment isn‘t provided yet). Once they arrive at your home, put the slides into a safe place, put the CD into your computer, sit back and enjoy your now digitized, altered images that you took as pictures long ago.