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Participant
November 11, 2020
Answered

Lightroom Classic good for 35mm slide organization?

  • November 11, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 448 views

I have a couple hundred 35 mm slides my father took that I will be digitizing and organizing. I just got a Epson scanner, but I am wondering the best tool to organize all the slides. Can Lightroom classic do the job and allow me to add metadata tags such as year, people in the shots, etc that can all be searchable like a visual database?

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Correct answer dj_paige

"Can Lightroom classic do the job and allow me to add metadata tags such as year, people in the shots, etc that can all be searchable like a visual database?"


Yes.

 

It doesn't matter to Lightroom Classic if the photos are scans of slides, or digital camera raw images, you can organize them in Lightroom CLassic. Remember, Lightroom Classic is just a tool, and like any other tool, the benefit you get is proportional to the effort you put in, and organizing takes effort. How much effort is up to you, it's not up to the tool.

3 replies

dj_paige
dj_paigeCorrect answer
Legend
November 11, 2020

"Can Lightroom classic do the job and allow me to add metadata tags such as year, people in the shots, etc that can all be searchable like a visual database?"


Yes.

 

It doesn't matter to Lightroom Classic if the photos are scans of slides, or digital camera raw images, you can organize them in Lightroom CLassic. Remember, Lightroom Classic is just a tool, and like any other tool, the benefit you get is proportional to the effort you put in, and organizing takes effort. How much effort is up to you, it's not up to the tool.

JP Hess
Inspiring
November 11, 2020

People's names and years and places can all be added as keywords. After they have been added it is possible to search on any of those keywords because the Lightroom catalog IS a database. It is also possible to create collections and group your scanned images if you should choose to do so. I have scanned several thousand slides and prints and have added keywords to group them into various different searchable groups. 

gary_sc
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 11, 2020

Yes and no. 

 

the problem is that if you have for example a folder for your mom's family and another for your dad's family and another folder for trips. How do you organize your images when you have big family gatherings and/or you take a vacation to your dad's or mom's family home? The only real way out of this is to use keywords. Bridge is very good and very bad with keywords in that you have to be IN the master folder for Bridge to find the keywords for your images. So unless you keep the various folders all in one folder, it will not work.

 

Let me add here that I found Lightroom Classic to be a better place to store and process the images. Keywording is much more powerful than Bridge and it also has facial recognition. Admittedly it is dumber than poo in the beginning when recognizing faces but as you "teach" it the faces, it does remarkably well. 

 

FWIW, I had about 10,000 slides to deal with (a lifetime of photography), and also about 1700 family images to deal with. Note, I also have an Epson scanner (V800) and it is good. I did scan the photos but when you think about how much time it takes to do a proper scan for each slide (about 5 minutes to get highest possible optical resolution (not digital resolution), and to run ICE, and to run all of the other important options that should be done at time of scanning NOT later in Photoshop, it averaged out to about 5 minutes. I started this after I retired and realized that I'd never finish in my lifetime. I then worked out a process for taking photos of the slides. Contrary to popular belief, not every photo that one takes is a true great image. So my process was to photograph the slides, and ones that were very good, I'd go back and properly scan them. 

 

These are three articles that I wrote for Adobe on the process, some of it may interest you.

 

Digitizing Your Slides by Photography

https://community.adobe.com/t5/adobe-community-professionals/digitizing-your-slides-by-photography/td-p/4785336

 

Processing the Photographs of Your Slides

https://community.adobe.com/t5/adobe-community-professionals/processing-the-photographs-of-your-slides/td-p/4785342

 

Dealing with Textured Prints when Scanning

https://community.adobe.com/t5/adobe-community-professionals/dealing-with-textured-prints-when-scanning/td-p/4785357?page=1