Back in the good old days, a 35mm slide was considered to be the best of the best technology for cameras and was taken up by enthusiastic photographers in a big way. It was, for some people, the only way of storing their precious photos for a long time. Times have changed and digitization has taken over. The default choice today is to transform your 35mm slides to digital versions for storage.

Digital photo scanning trumps the old 35mm slides in many ways. Firstly, it was and still is very difficult to preserve 35mm slides for many years. Also, it is a very tedious task to set up the whole projector and set up the slides to watch them. This is especially true when compared to the fact that everything can be done so easily using PCs and Macs.

If you want to pick one advantage of digital images, I would say that storing them is about as easy as it gets. CDs and DVDs seem to be the most popular methods of storing the photos. They are very convenient to insert into the computer whenever you want to view your old photos. Today's large flat screen televisions make viewing photos an even richer experience.

Yes, there is some risk that you might lose your optical disc. However, that shouldn't be a problem at all since you can store them right in the computer itself, making that claim instantly invalid. It is very easy to back those photos up as many times you want in your computer. An even better idea would be to copy them over into an external hard disk or a flash drive for better portability.

Yet more advantageous is the fact that you can back your precious photos up by uploading them to the web, which is not possible with 35mm format. Portability is the highlight of converting 35mm slides to digital format. When you photos reside on the internet, they are safe even from natural disasters. It also makes it much easier for you to share those photos with other people.

Now that you are comfortable about scanning your 35mm slides and creating their digital versions, consider how you are going to go about it. You can either do it yourself or give the job to a scanning service. If you have a good scanner at home, which can give you high quality digital images, you can always get the job done at home itself.

Image detail is very important when scanning the old photos because you want the absolute best viewing experience. If you don't have a good scanner, don't risk losing your precious memories and delegate the job to a scanning service.

Another thing to bring into consideration is how many photos you want to convert to digital. You might not have the time to scan all the photos is there are many of them. That makes a case for getting a scanning service to convert your 35mm slides to digital format. A good scanner will also offer to correct irregularities such as folds or dirt particles on the photos.