Organize Your Slides Properly

Where do you start?

First of all, do you have a working 35 mm slide projector? If you do, you might spend time in a dark room viewing your slides and picking the ones you want scanned. It’s not an easy job, but many people do it because the end result is worth the trouble—depending on how much time you have.

If you don't have a working projector, note that Kodak no longer manufactures 35 mm slide projectors. You might find a used one at a thrift store or online, but prices can be high, reliability varies, and bulbs are not inexpensive.

One alternative is a lighted viewer such as the Pana-Vue Automatic viewer. It magnifies the slide so you can see what it looks like, with a 2 5/8" square viewing screen. You can stack and view up to 36 slides at one time. It operates with an easy push-pull action and bright 4× magnification. Runs on two “D” batteries or household current with an optional transformer.

If you need to go through thousands of slides, a viewer isn’t perfect—but it’s relatively inexpensive and can make sorting manageable before you send slides in for scanning.