How to Transfer a Slide to Digital

Power up your scanner and computer. If you have just purchased your scanner, connect it to your computer, usually with a USB cable, and install any software that was included with the scanner.

Create a folder on your computer’s hard drive where you will save the scanned files. If you have a lot of slides to scan, you may want to create a number of different folders and organize the slides into them, by date, subject or event.

Prepare your slides for scanning by gently cleaning them using an anti-static cloth. This specially treated cloth will remove dust from your slides and help stop any dust collecting on them during the scanning process.

Load the slides into the carrier tray if you have a film/slide scanner, or lay them on the flatbed scanner and close the lid.

Set the scanner to slide mode and at the highest possible resolution. You can set both of the variables through the scanner's software. Start the scan. Once the scan has been completed, save the new file in the appropriate folder. It is a good practice to save the original scan as a TIFF file. While these files are larger than JPEG files and will take up more space on your hard drive, they retain more information compared to a JPEG file, which discards some information when it is compressed. Repeat this process for each slide you wish to scan.