For the seller

What to do with old slides and negatives

A family photo album with old pictures

Boxes of slides and negatives turn up beside almost every camera collection, and the first instinct, to throw them out, is almost always wrong. To a family they are the photographs; to a collector they can be documentation; and in rare cases they are photography worth taking seriously in its own right. Look before anything goes.

Slides are the mounted transparencies that went in a projector; negatives are the strips the prints were made from. Both keep remarkably well in a dry cupboard, and both can still be turned into files and prints today.

First: whose photographs are they?

Before anything else, hold a few up to a window or a lamp. Family slides, holidays, birthdays, the old house, belong to the family, and the only mistake you can make is losing them. Keep them with whoever keeps the family's memory, and digitise the good ones; nothing about selling a camera collection requires the photographs to go too.

Are old slides worth anything?

Usually their worth is personal rather than commercial, but there are exceptions worth knowing:

  • Documentation of places and times: street scenes, shops, cars, airports, vanished buildings. Archives, local historians and collectors look for exactly this.
  • A photographer's own work: if the collector was a serious photographer, the slides are the point, not the by-product. Keep them with the collection; they are part of its story.
  • Unopened or unusual film stocks and professionally shot material have their own small collectors' fields.

What is rarely sought after: loose, unlabelled slides of unknown people. Even then, throw nothing away unseen.

Digitising, honestly

Every slide and negative can be scanned, at home with a scanner or a camera, or by a service. Do the sorting first: scanning everything costs the same per slide whether the slide matters or not, and most boxes hold a few hundred that matter and thousands that do not. Store the originals dry and dark afterwards; a scan is a copy, not a replacement.

Do not do this

  • Do not throw slides away unlooked-at, and never bin negatives just because prints exist; the negative is the original.
  • Do not wipe or wash them. Dust blows off; fingerprints etch in.
  • Do not split them from the cameras if the collector shot them: a camera collection with the photographs it took is a rarer and more complete thing than either alone.

When a collection comes with its photographs

We buy camera collections whole, and when the slides and negatives that were shot with those cameras come along, the story gets its evidence: the collector's eye, in colour, dated by the mounts. Family photographs stay with the family, always; we will say so ourselves if a box looks personal. How passing a collection on works is on Pass it on, and inherited a collection covers the first weeks after a house full of boxes arrives in your life.

Short answers

Are old 35mm slides worth anything?

To families, almost always; commercially, only certain kinds: documentation of places and times, a photographer's own work, unusual stocks. Look before throwing anything away.

Can old negatives still be printed?

Yes. Negatives and slides in reasonable condition can be scanned and printed today, decades on.

Do you buy slides?

As part of a collection with a story, gladly; family albums belong with the family, and we say so when we see one.

Why we keep the story

A collection is not a pile of objects.

It is years of somebody deciding what was worth keeping, and sold off piece by piece that is the first thing to go. So before anything is sold, we sit down with you and record it: how it started, what the best of it was, the piece that got away. That story stays on every object with the collector's name, and goes with it to whoever keeps it next. You get a page where you can see where each piece ended up.

Three ways the story gets recorded

On camera, where it lives. We travel to the collection and film it properly: you talking about how it started, the room and the shelves as they are, the objects in your hands. Wherever in the world the collection happens to be.

On a call. If the collection is sent to us rather than collected, we have the same conversation over a video call and write it up, with one photograph of the shelf as it stood.

In writing. If you would rather not talk at all, answer a handful of questions in your own time and in your own words. It goes on the objects exactly as you wrote it.

It never changes anything else, and you can always say no to it. Some conversations run ten minutes, some an afternoon. Read the collections we have taken on

If it is a whole collection

We buy whole collections, not single pieces: one person takes all of it, and the story is kept with every object. Tell us what you have and a person replies within two days.

How passing it on works, in full

1The collection
What is in it
Pick everything that applies. Something else opens a line to tell us.
Roughly how many pieces
A guess is fine. Nobody has counted.
How would you describe it
There is no wrong answer here, and a lot of ordinary is a normal collection.
One or two sentences. This is the question we care about most.
2Where it is, and how it could reach us
Town and country is enough.
How could it reach us
Unseend is in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Sending and bringing are as welcome as a visit; if it is sent, we pay the freight and insure it.
When does it need to be gone
No hurry is a good answer. It lets us plan a visit properly.
3Condition and photographs
In your own words. Broken, incomplete or untested is fine and is normal; it only needs saying.
Photographs
Three to ten photographs The room and the shelves as they stand. Phone photographs are fine, and a slow walk round on video says more than any of them.Send them to hello@unseend.com
Or attach them to the reply that comes back within two days. Any of them works, and nothing is looked at until a person reads it. Do not clean up first — the shelves as they stand tell us more than a tidy arrangement.
4The number, and the story
A number or a range, whatever you have in mind. You will get an honest answer either way.
Would you tell the story of it
Filmed at the collection wherever it is, on a video call, or written in your own time. It never changes the price.
5How to reach you
The reply comes here, from a person, within two days.
Only if you would rather be called.

Answered within two days, by the person who would come, and by email at every step after that. Nothing you send is shared with anyone, and your photographs are deleted if we do not go ahead.

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