Workflow - digitising slides

[gothatway]

I have lots of boxes of slides (going back to the 60's, from parents and in-laws) to digitise and I want to get the workflow as efficient as possible. I'm using a tripod-mounted Canon 70D with a 100mm macro lens, placing each slide in turn on a lightbox. The images seem fine to me (bearing in mind many of the slides are not wonderful quality anyway). I think I will probably only shoot JPG, not RAW.

The camera is tethered to my Win10 PC and I'm using EOS Utility to preview and fire the shutter; this then displays the image in DPP (or could be ImageBrowser or ZoomBrowser). While I have the slide in my hand I want to add keywords, usually written on the mount, to the image file, but DPP doesn't support this. I don't have LightRoom. I use DPP for most image manipulation, or The Gimp for anything beyond DPP's abilities. You can tell I like free stuff !

I'd prefer to avoid having separate sidecar files or file formats which might become discontinued. I could add keywords just using File Explorer (Title, Subject, Tags and Comments fields) which would add quite a few clicks to the workflow - and I'm not sure how usable those fields will be in years to come when I just want to search for photos of Great Aunt Mabel.

Any thoughts or experiences ?

[SCEtoAUX]

I'd shoot RAW along with .jpg - More storage needed and perhaps a compromise with speed, but there seems little point in throwing away information with a lossy format as an archive.

RAW will give you far more flexibility in the future too, should you wish to make an online album or just some really nice prints.

[Mr Pointy]

SCEtoAUX said:

RAW will give you far more flexibility in the future too, should you wish to make an online album or just some really nice prints.

If the OP ever wants to make an really nice prints he should forget using a camera & scan them properly.

[tight fart]

Got to disagree, scanners are much to slow, I copied 100s of slides using a slide copier that fits a digital camera. Fantastic results and you can do around 6 to 8 images minute.

[SCEtoAUX]

Mr Pointy said:

SCEtoAUX said:

RAW will give you far more flexibility in the future too, should you wish to make an online album or just some really nice prints.

If the OP ever wants to make an really nice prints he should forget using a camera & scan them properly.

Well yes, but if you're going to use the method specified then I think that saving a RAW version makes sense.

[gothatway]

From what I've seen so far, I guess that fewer than 10% of the slides are ever likely to be of interest and maybe 1% max would ever be printed. I do not intend to throw the slides away, so any stunners will be available to rescan "properly" if required. Hence efficiency - both of time and storage - are of paramount concern.

But my main question remains - how to tag/comment the images for ease of future retrieval, including by generations to come who will not have the faintest clue about how to use something like Lightroom (so will likely throw away any sidecar files or similar) ? I'm sorely tempted just to use Explorer, then at a later date automate the extraction of the fields and construct an index file (.txt) for each folder. I guess that jpg and txt file formats are as long-lived as any, and longer than most.

[Simpo Two]

gothatway said:

From what I've seen so far, I guess that fewer than 10% of the slides are ever likely to be of interest and maybe 1% max would ever be printed. I do not intend to throw the slides away, so any stunners will be available to rescan "properly" if required. Hence efficiency - both of time and storage - are of paramount concern.

But my main question remains - how to tag/comment the images for ease of future retrieval, including by generations to come who will not have the faintest clue about how to use something like Lightroom (so will likely throw away any sidecar files or similar) ? I'm sorely tempted just to use Explorer, then at a later date automate the extraction of the fields and construct an index file (.txt) for each folder. I guess that jpg and txt file formats are as long-lived as any, and longer than most.

I'd shoot RAW, then process to JPG and save them in folders by years or by person.

'Lightroom Sidecar files' won't mean Jack Schitt to future generations; keep it idiot-proof.

I'm not clear on the advantages of scanner over slide if you can photograph them in a fraction of a second at c.4,000 dpi.