Slides. Slideshow. Carousel.

These words we associate with PowerPoint, Keynote, and the presentations that occur in every meeting originated from real objects. Until Microsoft popularized PowerPoint, creating a presentation meant designing content, sending it to a production team, and setting up a slide projector and screen to show the slides.

35 years of slides

My parents started taking slide photography long before I was born in 1969. The trend continued until the mid 1990s, when camera and phone technology advanced. All of us moved to modern technology.

My brother offered to digitize all of the approximately 4,000-5,000 slides using a high-speed scanner. For several years this was his intention until he called me one day and said, “If you want the slides, come and get them.” My dad – who lives close to my brother – retrieved the slides.

A few weeks later I visited my dad and loaded the 15 carousels and 5 large boxes of slides into my car. Now that I had the slides, I had another problem.

Slide scanning

I had no way to scan the slides. I checked with a couple of friends who I thought might have this old technology and hit the jackpot! One of my friends had a small scanner that let me save desired slides onto a SD card. The scanner – see image below – worked great. Over a holiday weekend I reviewed and scanned all of the slides.