Easy way to transfer tons of old photos to flash drive

Bumpyroad wrote:

1492 wrote:
How valuable are your photos? I'm always a little leery of handing over priceless photos over to a third party service. Especially, if they are not a professional lab. You don't know if they will handle them properly to prevent damage, or if they may even be lost. Better IMO to do it yourself. .

reminds me of a trip I had to Egypt a number of years ago which also included giving some presentations to a branch of their government. not totally stupid I brought along a bunch of spare/seconds slides. they of course wanted to borrow/copy them and when I got them back it looked like they had put them through a wringer on an old washing machine. :)
bumpy

Back in the late '80s, I was director of motion picture and video services for one of the largest companies of its kind in the DC area. We also had a professional still photo lab department, that specialized in providing slide and 5x7 transparency duplications virtually identical to the originals. Our clients were well known photographers and stock photo agencies around the U.S. They would send us their originals, which takes a lot of faith in any company as they are irreplaceable. In turn, these stock agencies would send out our custom duplications to ad agencies, magazines, news outlets, etc, preserving their originals. In fact, our transparency duplication equipment were all custom made, actually from converted 35MM and 70MM motion picture cameras.

I was not involved with the still photo department, but occasionally would get a request to make a slide show video of a client's 35mm slides. Doing so took a custom built optical stand and computer, either shot on 16mm film negative or on Betacam SP cameras. A 5-10 minute slide show video would typically cost our clients $2,500.-$3,500. Adding music and narration was extra, and could end up costing $5-6,000.+ You would not believe how many requests we had, in the healthy six figures yearly for just this service.

Of course, the only PCs at that time were 8088XT based, or Apple IIc I believe. No slide show software or personal scanners for that matter. But, we were a professional service, and carefully handled and cleaned each slide before any type of duplication or transfer to video.

Fast forward today to drug store or warehouse services offering photo and slides to CD/DVD transfers. Does anyone really believe these are professionally trained photo technicians? Cause whether you are a pro photographer, stock agency, or just someone with family photos, they are just as precious and irreplaceable in most cases. So best to do the photo scanning and archiving yourself as you will likely do so with the proper respect that it deserves.