“Scanning” Slides – a Practical Cheat

using my cellphone

I’m guessing that many of the older picture takers among us have a mountain of slides sitting their closet in a proverbial shoebox. Hopefully they’re not collecting dust.

I was introduced to digital images in the late 1990s and since then I’ve been scanning thousands of my slides and transparencies. I started by using a reasonably priced flatbed scanner since I couldn’t justify a more expensive piece of equipment. The flatbed produced quite good results but at the expense of time and patience.

About a year ago I started using a simpler method to digitize the slides. The slides aren’t scanned. Instead I photograph each of them with a cellphone. The results are quite acceptable- image resolution and sharpness – since my goal is to archive all of these “forgotten” photos.


Here’s how I “scanned” a slew of slides in a very short while:

One of many boxes of slides that I have stored away
Here’s a vintage slide viewer that I’ve kept for many years
The slides are arranged in rows. This viewer can accommodate a full roll of 36 slides.
Here are slides from one of the boxes. You can rearrange them here if you want to maintain a particular order for digitizing.
This picture shows a group of slides. Use the zoom feature of your cellphone to zero in on a single slide.
Here I am zeroing in on a single slide. I’m careful to capture the entire slide.
Here is the unretouched image from the cellphone.
Another unretouched image from the cellphone
The quality of the cellphone image is quite good including color and contrast
Another image that helps me remember events from the past

Afterward the cellphone images are transferred to my desktop or laptop. From there I can work with them using my usual editing software.

I’ve digitized hundreds of slides using the cellphone and most of them are more than acceptable for archiving my huge collection of memories and events. As a bonus for my efforts wading through these slides, I was pleasantly surprised to run across people, places and things that I haven’t thought about in many years.

Please keep in mind that if the resulting images using the cellphone do not meet your quality requirements you still can scan the originals using a more traditional scanning method.

Give this technique a try to see if the results meet your requirements.

Written by:

Arnie Lee

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