How to safely store you slides.

Many clients come to us to have their slides scanned, we receive a wide range of slide sizes and have never, not been able to scan a slide we've received. We'd like to think we know quiet a lot about slide scanning!

A very common question we are asked is how the slides should be stored? Below we'll try to answer this question and few more.

Environmental conditions?

Ideally your slides should be stored in a dark, moisture free, cool environment. Often slides that have been found in attics stored in a slide box, look as good as the day they were received back from the developers! We have noticed that quiet often slides that have been kept in warmer climates (Far East for example) will have slight mould growth on them, this mould can be very hard to remove without damaging the transparencies. We have scanned may 1000's of this 'growth' affected type of slide and clean them as well as possible with distilled water. The machines we use have the ability to 'see' past some layers of mould.

Extreme heat will cause the transparency to curl, bend and bow. We can scan these transparencies by clamping them flat and scanning on a flat bed scanner, we then scan them with a variety of focal points on the transparency to capture the best image possible.

Extreme cold will cause the transparency to become very brittle over time; we tend to scan these on our flat scanner so the scanner optics move rather than the transparency being placed in a moving hopper.

Exposure to ligh will fade the transparency, our scanned can capture nearly all the image from these slides, then once in a digital format the image can be remastered on a computer (PC or Mac)

Storage containers?

There are a wide variety of storage containers available for slides, most common are 35mm slides, but you can purchase storage for small 110 slides and large format 2.25" slides. For smaller collections storage box's for 24 or 36 slides at a time work well, these tend to be the type received back from the developer. There are drawbacks with this type of box, the two main ones being that the slides are pressed together causing them to rub against each other during transit. The second being it can be difficult to select an individual slide from this type of box.

The next type of storage box is one that comes with individual slots for each slide, these type keep the slides from touching each other and makes selecting an individual slides much easier. These type of box can sometimes be used with slide projectors. Or there are boxes with flip lids to keep dust out. One thing we have noticed that older boxes, which were foam lined, are of such an age that the foam has deteriorated now and covered the slides in 1000's of partials of foam dust. We clean this dust off with an air compressor. When scanning from projector mounted boxes we need to be very carful to scan the slides in the correct order as sometimes the boxes are numbered 1 through to 'x' starting at both ends of the box!

The next level in slide storage are transparent pouches, which are then stored in a ring binder. The advantage of this type of storage is that you can very easily see each individual slide whilst there are protected in a plastic wallet. When working with this type of storage we tend to work scanning the slides top left corner, working left to right.

We sell a variety of storage for you slides and can transfer your slides, once scanned into newer containers.

To see how we scan your slides please click here.

Like to know more?

Call now on 0844 310 0050 (or click here) to request samples, ask advice or arrange a free no-obligation quotation.

How we care for your slides