In summer 2007, SLX Photographic was privileged to be awarded a contract from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society to scan the Anna Hanlon Collection of colour 35mm slides.

The total number of slides scanned was 21,123 requiring 10 months to complete. We scanned the slides at 3200 dpi, performing digital ICE processing and saving as 16-bit Tiff files. After Photoshop retouching and colour / brightness / contrast adjustments the scans were saved both as Tiff and Jpeg. The 3200 dpi Jpeg files were further copied and reduced to 150 pixels wide for web site thumbnails, and all three copies were stored in their own sub-directories on 1500 GB of hard disk.

Many of the slides provided a challenge in that they were glass mounted, with the common problem of grime and dust inside the glass, film deterioration due to age, and the Newtons Rings that occur where the film and glass come into contact.

The job also required us to create Excel spreadsheets for each Series, where a series usually contained the pick of the films taken on a particular trip. The spreadsheet contained the file name, which matched the slide and film number, its position in the slide show sequence, the date the picture was taken, location, country and description as gleaned from Anna's own notebooks.

The entire collection of scanned thumbnails is being made available on the RSGS website as part of their "Images for All" initiative.