Keep all your photos, slides, negatives, or whatever. Purchase a scanner specifically designed for scanning the material. I used an EPSON PERFECTION V300 PHOTO. When done scanning, sell the scanner via Ebay, Craigslist...

The photo scanner will allow you to place as many photos as will fit on the scanner bed, distinguish among them, and give each a different title. This greatly speeds up the scanning process. The scanner handles 35mm slides as well as negative material, 6 at a time if I remember properly. The scanner software allows one to correct for some defects present on the source material.

Once finished, delete the inferior result, perhaps the image derived from the negative might be better than the one derived from the photo.

You will want to burn the images onto a CD or DVD

There are several means to display your scanned images, but nothing is more pleasing than using a large screen television (50" or more).

Regards

Just today I passed our local Walgreen drugstore, and the sign out front said, "We still develop photo film." So it is still possible to have prints made from your negatives I would assume.

I second the suggestion to get a good scanner that scans negatives and slides. I have the Epson Perfection 3170 Photo scanner which I purchased directly from Epson (refurbished). I think it was $79, and it has done a wonderful job of any scanning task I have asked of it. It makes great copies of printed materials, too, so I just have a plain inkjet printer, not an AIO.

Thanks Grandms. I have a silly question...what good are scanned negatives? I also have some slides. I have a scanner but I should get a photo scanner for this job?

By scanning the negatives and saving to disks, you can then throw out the old negatives and still have new prints made using the disks. Much easier because a disk will hold so many more. Of course, disks don't last forever, either, but if you have the pictures (prints) saved to disks and also have the negatives saved that way, you have a better chance of not losing precious pictures that may be invaluable to you. I think I'd save one set of disks, probably the copies of negatives, in a separate location such as a bank safe deposit box, if they are really valuable. Just depends on how important these are to you.

Need to clarify something, I guess. You can scan the negatives and save to your computer, then burn to disks. This way you can probably save all your negatives to just a few disks and rid yourself of all these saved negatives. My prior post makes it sound as if you can scan directly to the disks. Sorry about that.

Does your present scanner have the ability to scan slides and negatives? This Epson I have is not a new model at all; in fact, I've had it for several years, so you should be able to pick one up that has this ability fairly cheap. Check the Epson website and see what they have among their refurbished products. They sell with a full warranty, too.

Okay, I'm still not getting it. You must have a special scanner to do the negatives and slides, right? Cause I can't imagine printing from a scanned negative...sorry to be so dense.

I have no idea if one can print from a scanned negative on a home printer. The scanner just turns the negative into a digital image, the same as a scanned print, so a store that can print pictures from CDs should (I think) be able to print from the scanned negatives. I have never used this feature as yet, always putting it off, but my setup instructions that came with the scanner tell how to scan these things. I'm not a photo expert at all, so maybe I should give this a try and let you know what happens. I noticed that NOCANDO, the poster who first responded to you, has a similar scanner to mine. Not all scanners have this capability, but there are probably others besides these models that can do this. I just thought I'd like to be able to make prints from my slides, so that is the main reason I bought this model.

No expert here but I have scanned a lot of slides. It is my understanding that to scan slides and negatives you need the light to come from above the slide or negative so that goes through the slide or negative to the sensor instead of coming from below and being reflected back to the sensor like it is when scanning a photo or document. So you do need a photo scanner or an adapter for one that does not have the backlight. I haven't scanned any negatives but you would get a digital image of the photo, not a copy of the negative.

NOCANDO I use a program called IrfanView that will turn a negative into a positive photo by selecting the choice NEGATIVE from a list of options. Might help some.

Thanks so much. Now I'm getting it. I couldn't imagine just scanning a negative or a slide and being able to make a photo out of it. I will check out the scanners.

Casi, use Google to search more information on this subject. There are photo forums where this very question has been addressed.

I may not have been clear in my previous post. You should scan your negative and give it a name on your computer's desktop. Open it in IrfanView and from the View menu choose convert to negative. Since the choice of negative changes it to a positive image.