What to do with old slides and negatives

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 more complete record 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.