Best on-line photo hosting solution for old 35 mm slides?

July 30, 2019 7:21 AM

I have a number of old (50's-early 80's) 35 mm slides I would like to scan in and digitize. These days where is the best place to host/make them available on the internet for people to find/see?

Some may be of historical interest (both local and general: behind the scenes concert and sporting events, 1980 DNC convention in NYC, stuff like that).

In the past for projects like this I have used Flickr but that site isn’t what it once was for a lot of reasons and facebook has its own host of problems.

Is self-hosting my best bet? Not looking to make money off the project, in fact I figure it will probably cost me a few bucks for the scanning and hosting, its more one of those “these are neat snapshots of history that should be saved somewhere people can see/find them”. Thanks!

posted by Captain_Science to Technology (4 answers total)

I spent a long time hosting my own photos and have two things to say about it: 1) it’s a pain in the butt to do over the long term (stuff changes and breaks and it’s not always when you have time to fix it), and 2) Self hosting is terrible if you want anyone to find your photos and look at them.
posted by aubilenon at 7:52 AM on July 30, 2019 [2 favorites]

If having people find them is of importance, you may want to contact the library of your local colleges or universities. Whether or not they will be interested in the images and/or the original slides depends on a number of factors, but having them stored in a well-cataloged library collection is the best way to make them discoverable to future searchers.
posted by Rock Steady at 8:01 AM on July 30, 2019

If you self host, unless they're of a niche interest that people trawl the deeper pages of Google for, very few people are going to find them at this point. There's so much content out there and so many people largely stick to the walled gardens of social media that if you're not on the first page or two of a Google search, you're not going to get a lot of attention.

Were I taking on the project, I'd probably use Flickr (Smugmug is a pretty decent company, so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt on trying to fix problems) and then use an automated tool to post a picture or two a day (with good tagging) to Instagram with an link back to the larger collection. It would give you some discoverability on a site that people search for photos on still while also putting stuff out where the majority of people look at photos.
posted by Candleman at 9:27 AM on July 30, 2019 [4 favorites]

If you want to gather a following of people seeing new photos as you post them, then Instagram (if you can handle its Facebook-ness).

If you want somewhere for them to live on the web and hopefully be discoverable for a while (I wouldn’t say “forever”, the web being what it is) I’d still go for Flickr, personally. Partly because you can attach a lot of metadata that is useful, and searchable, that would get complicated to equal if you were self-hosting.

So perhaps, as Candleman says, you should do both.

I think I’d only self-host if (a) I enjoyed developing (and maintaining) a good rich site for them, (b) there were enough photos for this effort to be worthwhile, and (c) they all had a common theme that meant they made sense as a site (as opposed to some apparently random old photos).
posted by fabius at 1:39 PM on July 31, 2019