If you were born before the 2000s when digital cameras weren’t that common, slides and negatives were how people captured their valuable moments. However, as time has passed, the use of slides has significantly reduced.
Before we go any further, let’s just warn you of duplicate photos. They are a big mess, and that’s how they must be treated. Use a specialized duplicate & similar photo deleting software like PictureEcho to clean up any duplicate photos that you have converted from a slide.
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In today’s age, almost everyone prefers digital photos that they can easily view on computers, phones, or even TVs. This is exactly why most slides from the old days are often left in a corner of the house. Don’t you want to revisit old memories by looking at the pictures hidden in your slides? The best way to preserve your old slides is to digitize them. In this article, let’s discuss how you can convert such old slides into digital photos.
Professional Photo Organizers
The easiest way to digitize your slides is to hire a professional photo organizer. They use special tools that result in high-quality digital photos and make the task easier. Once all your photos have been digitized, you can also get their prints at the same time.
While this is the most convenient way, depending on how many photos you want to digitize, it might get costly.
Invest in a Digital Image Converter (Slide Scanner)
Digital image converters are specialized scanners that can photograph slides and turn them into high-quality digital photos. For most scanners, each slide takes about 30 to 40 seconds to be scanned. This will allow you to digitize a bunch of slides in a much shorter time.
Currently, one of the best digital image converts is the Wolverine Snap-14, which digitizes a single slide in less than 3 seconds. Not just this, but the machine also allows users to fine-tune their images. Whether you are looking for minor color corrections or want to increase the brightness, this powerful machine will let you do it all with ease.
You can easily find a slide scanner online.
Slide Copiers or Dupers
Slide Copiers, also known as dupers are simple devices that can fit along with your DSLR and let you photograph each slide manually. The resulting images are of a high resolution and that’s exactly what you would want. It is suggested that while taking photographs from your DSLR, you choose RAW file type mode instead of JPG. This option is bound to provide better quality results.
Flatbed Scanners
Flatbed scanners are a cheap alternative for digital image converters. Although the result isn’t the best in terms of picture quality, it is still decent enough. In order to enhance the quality, you can try creating a cardboard adapter which reflects light between the scanner and the slide.
Use a Projector
Another easy (but indirect) way to digitize your slides is by using a project. To begin with, project your slides onto a flat-screen and then simply photograph the projects. For convenience, you can set up a tripod stand with your camera. However, as you can imagine, if you use this method, the quality of your digital photos wouldn’t be up to the mark. This method is free but would probably require a lot of effort and time.
These are just some of the methods you can use to convert slides into digital photos.
What’s Next?
Once you have digitized the photos, there comes another issue: duplicate photos! It is very likely that during the whole scan or photographing process, you will end up generating several duplicate or similar files.
Dupes and unnecessary similar files simply waste your device storage space’s storage. Not just this, but they also significantly hamper the speed and performance of your device. Now, let’s take a look at what can be done regarding such files.
PictureEcho
PictureEcho has made its mark due to its smart algorithms that can help the users scan and delete duplicate photos. Now we move on to an even better feature. PictureEcho scans your image collection for visually similar images as well. This is a big plus point, which will provide you another option to remove the extra trash and free up storage space.
PictureEcho works in three simple steps:
- Scan Your Computer
Load all the folders/file paths that you wish to scan into PictureEcho. Select the scan mode (exact match/ similar match). Select a scan level (if you opt for the Similar Match. Click Start Search to launch the scan. You can search for exact duplicates as well as similar files. PictureEcho supports the most popular image formats for both the scan types. RAW images are supported only for the Exact Match as of now. - View Reports
Once the scan is over, PictureEcho will lay out the results for you. The footer of the software will provide handy stats about the scan such as the number of duplicates detected, storage space occupied etc. - Get Rid of Duplicates
Now that you have a list of all the unwanted images, use the Select Duplicates menu to choose a category of duplicates that will be retained. All the remaining ones will be selected for onwards action. Finally, click Select Action and choose if you want to permanently delete the photos or move them to a folder of you will choose.
That’s all! This simple procedure will help you recover tons of storage space that can be used for more productive usage now that it has been freed up.
