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Howdy, I landed a decent quantity of old 35mm slides and have access to a pipeline of them. My first problem is how to turn them digital for the ebay listing. After a little research, I see that I have some options, ranging from outsourcing the job (no thanks, I don’t want to add to COGS), stand alone a slide digital-izing machine, flat bed scanner with high resolution, a variety of contraptions you can make from cardboard, pvc, or who-knows-what, DLSR with macro lens, etc…… What did you do to list your slides? I’m particularly inspired by the idea of doing 35mm slides for a variety of reasons: Ryanne’s recent sales of $60 per slide for a couple of good slides (WOW); the size; the idea that I could set up an assembly line approach to listing, and consistency of sourcing options. Let me know how it went for you! Thanks.
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i think the best option is what Paul (rydell relics) does. buy a 35mm slide viewer on ebay and just use your camera (or phone) to photograph them.
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I recently started listing slides, and I can tell you how I do them. I won’t claim that it’s the most efficient way, but it feels right to me. I use a flatbed scanner, the Epson V500 to be exact. It allows me to place 4 slides down at a time. It scans them fairly quickly as long as you don’t choose the extra options like color correction and unsharp mask (I wouldn’t do any of that anyways because it can be misleading to the person who wants to buy it). After I do a mass scan, I’ll take those digital images and run an automated macro in Photoshop which places a watermark on all of them. Is this necessary? I don’t know, probably not. But I do it anyways. I then take a normal front and back picture of the whole slide to show condition. I created a template on eBay for slides where all I have to do is enter some basic information and then list. Admittedly, this method will take more time to do than taking a picture of the slide held up to a light source. But you get the advantage of letting the buyer see all the details in the photo, including clarity and color which may be hard to determine in a picture of the whole slide itself.
So what it comes down to is this… Would you be ok with spending around $80-100 on a scanner? And how much time would you be willing to spend to prepare the listings? For an example, I recently scanned in almost 200 slides to my computer. That took about 5 hours total after I got the routine down. Plus another hour taking the front and back photos, and maybe another hour cropping those and doing the watermarks and general stuff. And it took me another hour or so to make a spreadsheet of all the information that was written on each of my slides, but that isn’t something that I would do every time. So 8 hours total I spent on this box of slides. But the hard part is done and now all I have to do is list them, which takes about 30 seconds per listing. So the big questions is, would I have sold the slides that I’ve sold had I not gone through all that trouble? There’s no way to tell. But I’m happy with the way I do them and it works for me.
By the way, that’s great that you have access to a pipeline of these! I’ve been playing around with the idea of putting out a want-ad on craigslist for old slides. Maybe offer a flat price of .20 cents per slide or something like that.
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I just started listing slides a few weeks ago and have had such good luck that I decided to buy a wolverine F 2-D film to digital converter. They are about $140 but it is so easy to use you can just feed the slides through and push a button for them to download to your computer. Works great and Will pay itself off pretty quickly. It also works with other sizes of negatives and 8mm or super 8mm film.
A cheaper way to shoot slides is to get a white piece of paper and blast even light onto it. This will be the background. Next take a clothespin and clamp the the bottom of the slide and stand the negative up in front of the bright white piece of paper. Don’t put any light on the negative just on the white background. Now you can take a good picture. If you’re using your phone app you will need to take the pictures first and then upload them afterwords because you will need to use your zoom function on your camera phone. You cannot zoom with your camera phone while you’re in the eBay app.
Thanks to Jay and Ryan for the idea to sell photo slides. I absolutely love looking through these things!
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I just listed about 400 35mm slides in 2 days. The fastest method is to get a small slide sorter like this one (I got one at a Garage Sale):
https://img1.etsystatic.com/000/0/5341006/il_570xN.54270003.jpgand use a Digital SLR camera on Macro mode. You literally can capture 1 slide every 2 seconds, then load the next batch onto the sorter and repeat.
After capturing all the slides into pics, upload them to the PC, view them and weed out ones that were originally out of focus, then list the rest one by one.
If you don’t have that many to do, use your PC screen with a bright white background, and rest the slides on the bottom edge so the light shines through, then use your camera. They come out pretty well too.
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Hi Marjean,
Just curious what are the slides of?
I had a very large batch of zoo pictures and flowers so I sold them all at once because I figured there was not much demand for a picture of one elephant or one hippo. And flowers I figure there is an infinite numbers of those.
If you figure the cost of your time and the cost of listing one slide (if you don’t have a large store) you might look into batching them into lots.
I am not an expert on this topic so others may have a different take on this.
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For every one that I listed there were 2 more that I did not list. I only listed interesting, funny, or collectible images of people, places, and things. Just sold one today for $32. A single slide. Most that I have sold are selling for about $10. $10 x 400 is $4000. Well worth 2 days work! The “leftovers” I have listed in several “lots.”
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