Now that the topic has been covered on what slide scanners to use, what would people on here recommend when it comes to storing slides? My collection consists of all original color slides I would like to keep in the greatest possible condition without having to deal with color fading/humidity/mold and also find a way to store them IE: binders, slide trays etc.

I’d like to give my collection the best possible treatment in order to keep the slides on archive in the case I should need to re-scan them or for any other purposes without the fear of them deteriorating at a faster rate. Even if this includes buying a specific fridge to keep slides at a reasonable temp to preserve color or having to buy a little more expensive slide holder just to make sure the picture and mount stay in the best possible condition.

Currently, I keep them on a flat surface in a cabinet inside my desk so light isn’t able to reach them 24/7 but I worry about the temperatures in my room and humidity when summer comes around. I also keep them in sleeves in order to prevent dust from gathering on the photos but they are not in holders or binders so I have to make sure I “keep all of my ducks in a row”. Finally, haven’t noticed any color fading or signs of deterioration yet and I hope to make sure I never do.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks again.

For the absolute best possible long term outcome:
Don’t ever touch the film.
Don’t expose them unnecessarily to light.
Put the slides in clear, polypropylene slide storage sheets so you can see them.
The sheets can be put in a good binder with acid free paper or poly cover.
If you put the sheets in a box, it should be acid-free archival quality card stock/board.
Humidity always should be less than 65% RH to prevent fungus. The lower, the better.
Temperature not higher than 75 degrees F.

Temperature and humidity can be hard to control but do the best you can. I’m currently lucky to have a very dry basement where the humidity stays about 50% to 60% and the temp never higher than 68 degrees. I’ve had zero degradation with careful storage in various locations for over 30 years.

Good luck.

I keep my slides in 2"x2" coin protector sheets in three ring binders. You can get fantastic deals for the sheets on eBay (I paid $10 for 50 sheets).

I've been collecting for several years and have found that the sheets offer adequate protection from anything that can harm the film. I take certain binders on trips with me sometimes when I meet up with friends so we can look at and trade them. In some cases the binders were left in a hot car for several hours and no damage was done to any of the slides.

I strongly advise against keeping them in your desk drawer as the film could easily be scratched or get dirty. I've found that carousels are not the best for protecting against dirt, dust, etc. either.

Thomas

I've always used Kodak film and processing, and all my slides and negatives taken in the last 60 years are still just fine. The suggestion of storing slides in plastic pocketed type sheets seems like the best idea to me, and putting my slides in them is on my list. The big drawback to slides is that every time you look at them, you're handling your originals, and any damage to my collection is from this one cause.

DO NOT take chances with heat or light. As an experiment, I took a crummy slide and left it in the projector to see how long it took to melt. It wasn't that long, and I would think that lesser damage might well result from lesser over exposures.

This last caution applies especially to negatives, but I can see it being an issue with slides --- BE DAMN CAREFUL WHOM YOU ALLOW TO PROCESS YOUR FILM, OR MAKE PRINTS, SCANS, OR COPIES FOR YOU. In the last few years, with the increase in digital photo storage, it has become commonplace for photofinishers to DESTROY YOUR ORIGINALS, and give you a disc of (often times crummy) scans. Then they harvest and sell the silver in the film emulsion. Even though most of us are not professional photographers, ALWAYS GO TO A PRO PHOTO LAB. When I became aware of this practice, nothing was said at the time I dropped my film off, but there was a great big "CYA" type notice in with my prints and scans informing me that "YOUR NEGATIVES WILL NOT BE RETURNED". Sure I could raise Hell about it, but my negatives were GONE FOREVER. ALWAYS ASK ABOUT THIS BEFORE TRUSTING ANYBODY WITH YOUR FILM !!!!!

I do have a few slides in single cut out coin sheets. Most of them though are in holders made of paper so I’ll have to sort that out. Would baseball card holders work in this situation as well or are those too flimsy with slides? My slides aren’t In a desk drawer they’re in a cabinet with a closed door to prevent light from seeping into them. Although they are stacked on top of each other, each one is in its own paper or plastic holder to prevent dust or scratches.

I almost sent a couple of slides to a family member to have developed at a local photo shop in their vicinity after said family member had taken films found in the basement of my great grandmothers house developed after she passed away. When the 8MM films were developed they were lazily put together so one minute you might see my grandfather running cross country in college and the next it was Christmas 7 years before. Luckily, I had a last minute decision to not give the slides to them. The two slides I would have given her if they’d been lost, one I could have lived without, the other I would have gone and raised hell about as you mentioned with your negatives. Now that I look back at it, I don’t think I ever saw those film reels from my great grandmothers basement ever again or if I did, they were too battered to do anything with them. I worry though that this disposal of film may have happened to my Great Grandfather’s B&W films and stills of steam post WW2 which have been lost due to other family matters.

The whole debacle of film developers becoming lazy and destroying originals for a few extra bucks has me worried to no end so I have decided to save up a few extra bucks for a very high end scanner to do the scans myself. This way I’ll not only be able to archive slides but other forms of media in a high quality digital format. I’ll also be able to load the digitized scans onto a thumb drive if I ever want to print them at my local CVS or Costco.

I took about 21,000 slides between 1980 and 2006 before I went fully digital and most of those are stored in archive quality storage sheets in albums and kept in a cupboard well away from any light sources.
When I scanned them all to produce digital versions between 2012 and 2015 (it took that long....) I was surprised how quickly some of those original slides had deteriorated, colour wise, over a relatively short period, depending on the film manufacturer.
Needless to say, the Kodak slide film ones were still as good as the day they were taken and the bulk of my slides were taken on Kodachrome 64 or 200, but in the late 1990's I had switched over to Jessops brand slide film (a UK camera store chain) which was made by Agfa and this had fared less well.
The worst, however, was Fuji slide film which I used in the early 2000's after Jessops dropped out of the slide film market and some of those had discoloured very badly. I haven't looked again to see if that deterioration has continued at the same rate, but at least I do have the scanned versions to "doctor" if it comes to it.

Indeed, Fuji slides discolour quite quickly; a pity as they seemed to have an edge over the Agfa slides. Kodak has always been unsurpassed, however.

I have a Kodak original slide of a PRR T1 from 1947 which still looks good. Of course I have no means of making a judgement in how far the colours may have changed within the decades, but I am quite sure an Agfa would have turned completely reddish by today!

There has been a phase when all the photo shops offered glass frames. I tried them and got rid of them very soon again - Newton's rings as well as the danger of fungus.


In the time I digitalized some of my slides I got the impression getting the original colours back again in Photoshop seems to be much easier with Fuji than with Agfa.

Mike.

What company makes the sheets you put in your binders?

Now that is a very good question......

Mine all came from a firm here in the UK who used to advertise regularly in various enthuisiast publications - certainly up to about 10 years ago - and who sold archive quality storage sheets for a wide range of products - i.e. slides, photos, coins, banknotes, postcards, cigarette cards, etc, etc. As its now getting on for 20 years since I actually bought any, I can't remember the name of the Company (and they don't have a makers name on them) but similar ones are still available from other sources, as a quick search online came up with this...

https://www.preservationequipment.com/C ... sparencies

We certainly still use such sheets at our local Transport Museum, so the equivalent sheets must be available for purchase from sources in North America. Make sure they are suitable for archival storage though, as they need to be acid free and not any type of plastic that is going to degrade over time!

Once more, GO TO A PRO PHOTO SHOP, even if you're not a pro !!! They stock the good stuff. About 6 months ago I was buying film, and the clerk was a young kid who was busy tinkering with a Super8 camera. I asked him if that was what it looked like, and he said yes. Next question he answered by telling me that you can still get film and processing for it !!! Too bad he couldn't get the camera to work... I then commented that if he could still get super8 film and processing, I'd be shooting 35mm forever.

A pro photographer friend of mine says that a Kodak employee told him that film was here to stay because if you go into a courtroom with a case supported by a negative or a slide, the judge will accept that over any kind of digital or electronic evidence. The reason being that if film has been altered, you can always tell. If an electronic file has been altered, it isn't always possible to tell it. Lots of pros, photography students, and crabby old dudes like me still use film, too. 35mm costs about $15 a roll now, processing and proofs, maybe $40 a roll.

I still like my K-1000s. They've never given me an error message or quit working because of low batteries.

Two archives with which I have worked went a different direction with slide storage:

They both bought very large card catalog files from government surplus--one from a university, one from a state surplus warehouse. An enterprising volunteer with a wood shop made thin slats to insert into the drawers that enabled each drawer to hold two rows of slides side by side. One archive ended up with two so far in use in the library, another two still stored in reserve, and another sent to a volunteer's house for scanning and sorting (and he can just swap out drawers as needed). The individual slides, all labeled, sit like cards in a card catalog, in sub-categories easily added to and expanded as needed.

I seem to recall the volunteer used some finish inside the drawers to make them "archival"; at any rate, the drawers spend 99.9% of their time closed in a dark room in temperature-controlled setting, anyway.

A real question is, how do you classify them? Suppose, as a hypothetical example, you have a slide from one of the classic multiple-loco line-up photo ops..................

This really is my day job. If you don't need to access them, freeze them. Color dyes fade in light and in darkness, albeit at different rates. https://www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org/education/publications.html will have lots of resources. Dry is also good, though the more you lower the temp, the more work you need to do to keep the RH low. I use products from Hollinger Metal Edge for the hundreds of thousands of slides I care for.