Storing your old slides
While your slides may have survived many years in a box in the attic, once digitised and stored electronic format, you will be faced with the dilemma of what to do with the originals. In this article we explore the options of what to do post-digitisation.
Key questions to consider in your decision are:
- Once digitised - what format will your slides be held?
- Once digitised - where will your images be stored?
- Once digitised - may you ever want to return to the originals?
- Do you have the space to store your originals?
Of these questions, it's probably the final one which is the most critical - if you are digitising your slides to save physical space, then all other considerations are secondary. Scan them and let them go!
However, if you are not constrained by space, we'd recommend storing the originals for potential future access.
While the formats of digital images have been standardised over the years - 'jpeg' and 'png' being the most common for digitised photographs - new techniques for compressing the underlying information into digital code cannot be ruled-out from future development and while a path from current formats to new ones is likely, converting from original scans will more than likely yield a better conversion to any new format.
In our article on digitising your slides we also consider screen resolution. It's not been too long since big TVs have become affordable to the masses, requiring high screen resolution for viewing enjoyment. Producing suitable content for such devices requires capturing images at even higher resolutions and who knows where technology can take us. It's fair to assume digital capture (including scanning old archived material) will need to keep pace with viewing technology and so keeping your originals again allows you the option of a future upgrade to your scanning project.
The next consideration is where your digital images are going to be stored. It's something we've seen before with the move from floppy discs through to tape, to CDs, to DVDs, to hard drives and onward to 'The Cloud'.
While 'The Cloud' may be the ultimate destination for your images - indeed images uploaded to The Arkive will be stored in the Google Cloud - there is no guarantee that these providers will be around forever. Having a backup - especially in the original format - mitigates the risk of losing your precious collection.
Many of the free providers of image storage facilities (such as Facebook or Google Photos) store the image in a highly compressed and sometimes proprietary format, meaning any time you download your image, you are getting a lighter copy of the one uploaded with rarely an option to download in a standard format that can be read in image processing software.
While this isn't an issue with The Arkive - you can download the format used in the upload - we only store compressed images suited to screen resolutions, so when you download from us, you will lose image quality. Large prints are likely to require much higher resolutions than we store, so we don't recommend downloading Arkive images for this purpose.
For all these reasons, we recommend holding onto your original slides in a retrievable filing system wherever possible.