I recently finished sorting over 13,600 35mm slides - it was a 5 year project. I learned a lot. Here are some highlights:

1) Be brutal in what you toss out. The quality of many slides is disappointing compared to today's digital technology. Especially if they were taken on something less than a quality SLR. I pitched about 80%.

2) Get a light table (or make a giant one) for sorting and culling. Also get a loupe to look at them before deciding to scan them.

3) Now for the surviving 20%. Slide scanners are great. But flat beds are faster. I batched 20 slides at a time on a flat bed scanner and let her rip. Pretty easy and automated.

4) For the really special slides, I rescanned them with a slide scanner (I preferred Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400 over the Nikon Super CoolScan 4000 ED. I still own both of these scanners, but they are no longer made. Today I would probably buy a Plustek OpticFilm 7600i scanner. The difference between the flat bed scanner and the dedicated slide scanners is very notable.

5) I spent far more time labeling the scanned images than anything else. I tried to capture notes from the slides, processing dates, etc. as I went along (next to impossible to do afterwards).

6) I still saved all the scanned slides - not sure why, but I spent so much time with them, I must become emotionally attached. But they are now digitized and expendable. Whew!

7) Between sorting, culling, scanning, reviewing images, labeling and cataloging images using information on each slide, I spent far more then a minute per slide. So if you have 1,000 slides, cull out 80%, and scan 200, you can get that done in a couple weeks in your spare time. Look at the Epson V700 or V600 flatbed scanners if you don't have one - for 1,000 slides it is not worth buying a dedicated slide scanner in my opinion.

8) Oh, and if you want to buy a used dedicated slide scanner, be sure the manufacturer still supports the driver software for your current operating system. I understand that Nikon stopped supporting the CoolScan.

So was it all worth it? I think so, and I don't want to know otherwise (because there are a pile of unidentified 35mm negatives awaiting similiar treatment.... sigh...)