I’ve finally finished off the first phase of The Great Slide Scanning Project. About a month ago, I finally finished retouching the last of the slides — an old, heavily faded, blotchy, fungus ridden AnscoChrome slide of my cousin Susan riding a bicycle. Since then, I’ve been busily uploading them to a private, sister WordPress site, captioning them, adjusting thumbnail cropping and generally polishing. I’ve just sent a note to my cousins, letting them know about it. It’s done.

It was interesting dealing with a brand new WordPress installation. I ended up using the stock Twenty Twelve theme, mainly because of its dimensions and the way it deals with photo captions — some of the newer themes only showed captions when mousing over the images. I did like the Twenty Fifteen theme, but the attachment page images are bigger in Twenty Twelve. I’m less fond of it’s lack of customization — you can’t edit the stylesheet, and I’m not fond of the rather plain font used for the header. But it’s a site that will probably see a week’s worth of traffic as family members check it out, and then go dormant.

Phase II will be the pictures from my mother’s side of the family. There aren’t nearly as many of them, but there are around 70 old glass mounted slides from the 1940s, taken by my mother’s aunt, including some of my mother as a child. I’m hoping they’ll fit in the scanner. I’m also hoping they won’t need nearly as much retouching.

One slight problem is that I appear to have lost my old PowerMac G4 — it won’t start up, and that’s the machine I used to run the Polaroid dust and scratches filter. If I can’t get it running, I’ll need to find a better dust removal filter.