Slide Scanning: Part 5—Naming and Cataloguing the Scans
Base on my calculations—assuming I complete this project—it is likely that I will end up scanning somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 slides. The final number of slides scanned will depend on how strict I am about how many slides I scan from each packet.
Naming
This first thing I need to decide on here is the naming of the scans. I want to keep it simple, but it needs to be useful in the future when I might want to check back on the scans. After kicking around a few ideas I decided to use:
Slide-monthyear-seqno
So, each scan filename will start with the word ‘Slide’ followed with a hyphen.
That is followed by the month+year like ‘Mar85’ or ‘Nov96’, followed with a hyphen.
The suffix will be the automatic sequence number that the Epson scanning software adds to the file name.
All the scans will go into a new folder called \Slides.
Cataloguing
There are many and numerous tools you can use to catalogue your slides. As I have an Adobe photography subscription, and as I know how to use it, I am going to use Lightroom.
Each time I scan a set of four slides into the \Slides folder, I will then synchronise them into a catalogue in Lightroom that I have called SLIDES. I like to keep it simple.
Having my scans catalogued in Lightroom will allow me to see thumbnails of each slide and, should I want, I can quickly apply Lightroom changes to the slide to improve it. Changes such as exposure, colour corrections, or unsharpening.
As anyone who has used Lightroom will know, all Lightroom changes are non-destructive so these changes will not be made to my original ‘RAW’ scan. My master ‘RAW’ scan will remain untouched should I want to make different corrections at some other time. But, whenever I view or print the slide I can optionally apply my ‘improvement’ changes … or not.
Lightroom Catalogue Index