Automatically Digitize All of Your Old Film Slides

The transition from film to digital photography and videography has been a tremendous boon for creatives, but it has resulted in a situation in which old analog media is now difficult to access. Even just buying a roll of film or getting that developed is challenge today. It is also hard to view and share analog photos — especially when they’re in a slide format. To bring those into the modern digital age, Roger Ludwig and Francesco Bagnato designed the Filmolino SlideScanner to make digitizing old film slides easy.

Our younger readers may not even be familiar with film slides, so let us explain. Before the domination of digital photography, people had to have their film developed. Usually, they’d order photos to put in frames or albums. But it was also possible to order film slides that could be inserted into projection machines to present slideshows to a whole room of people. Those film slides are harder to digitize than standard photos, because you can’t simply scan or photograph them.

The Filmolino SlideScanner works by running the film slides through a modified projection machine. Most machines have magazine mechanisms to automatically feed slides, so this process is quick and efficient. Users can take advantage of the digital cameras they already own to capture the images and the only requirement is that the camera must have some sort of remote shutter control. An interchangeable lens DSLR or mirrorless camera will make it much easier to get a perfect capture.

An M5Stack Fire controls this process by advancing the projector to the next slide and triggering the camera. The M5Stack Fire is an ESP32-based development kit with a built-in display and battery, as well as accessible pins for connecting an IR transmitter if the user requires that for their camera. The user can control parameters like the number of slides to capture, time between slide changes, camera trigger type, and more through either a self-hosted web app or the M5Stack Fire’s built-in interface.

This isn’t a turnkey solution, as the user will have to tailor the setup to accommodate their specific projector and camera. But most of the hard work is already done, so this is a great starting point. The Filmolino SlideScanner will let you efficiently gather digital images of your slides, which you can then post-process in bulk as you see fit.