John Elk

My thanks to all for their suggestions. Perhaps 5% of those 400,000 images are scanned; I did all of these myself with a Nikon scanner and used the resulting images for our website and submissions to our own clients and agencies. Essentially all of these images are travel; many U.S. states and over 100 countries from the late 1960's until we converted to digital around 1998. Given the quality difference between a new digital file and a scan of an image that is now at least 20+ years old, I simply don't think the investment in time and effort would be worthwhile to scan any more. Some may have some historical interest, but again it's just not worth the time and energy to go through them. I continue to shoot and contribute, but even that has slowed down as royalty prices have fallen and since the economic crisis of 2008 what was once a thriving business through the 1980's, '90's and into the early 2000's is now almost moribund. And as I now move through my 70's I've got to prioritize how I use my remaining years, and somehow trying to hawk old slides just doesn't make the cut. I'd much rather spend these years with our continued travels (and the several months each year we now live in France). We throw out old clothes we've not worn in years and the some 17 filing cabinets of old slides do take up quite a bit of room in our house that we could use for other things. Time to clean obsolete things away. Thanks again to all! John

Dear All. Realizing that my 400,000 or so 35 mm transparencies are now essentially worthless (and are taking up a lot of room) I am trying to decide what is the easiest and most efficacious way of disposing of them. All of them are stored in 20 images per sheet plastic sheets and every one of them is labeled with identification and my name. The most obvious thing to do is just to slowly throw them out in the trash, but ideally I would like to take the slides out of the sheets, which I would then hope to recycle (though given their age none of these sheets has the triangle recycling symbol on them and as I used different products over time I'm quite sure they're not all of the same composition). I suppose I am also a bit worried about the fact that my name is on each slide, though I can't image anyone pawing through old, discarded images to try to resell them; still, it's something I do worry about a bit. The only colleague I know personally who has done this put his images in a trashcan and then threw bleach on them before disposing of them, but this would use a LOT of bleach and wouldn't take care of the label issue. I think this is as much detail as my problem deserves, so if you have any ideas/solutions to share with me I would be very much obliged. Thank you all!