13) Labeling, Organizing and Storing Slides of Artworks

I love the Logan boxes I got. They’re model 110. Slots hold each slide securely with air space between. The boxes seem to be plenty airtight and dustproof too.

For sending in a few slides at a time to be duplicated, these

small divided boxes from Porter’s are perfect. They’re also useful for storing a set of originals in a safety deposit box.

For making slide pages to send to galleries and registries, you’ll need good quality archival pages. PrintFile has the best reviews overall. I found a good selection online at a company called Get Smart Products.

Avery #5267 labels (or the same size) are most often recommended for labeling slides. You can use two labels, one for each wider part of the mount. In addition, a red Sharpie pen or Avery red dot labels (#05790) are needed to make a red dot on the corner that will be seen when the slides are loaded into a slide tray.

Looking at the slide from the base side, so your image is seen in its correct orientation, not reversed, the red dot goes in the lower lefthand corner of the slide mount. It’s customary to indicate orientation also by writing "top" at the top of the mount, or putting an upward pointing arrow there.

You’ll need to develop a consistent labeling format for slides that you label to send to galleries. I looked at quite a few articles on slide label formats, and found the most useful one to be at the Rowan University Department of Art.

Leave some slide sets unlabeled, in case you need to send them to a show jury that requires a certain label format.

You may have software like Working Artist from which you can print slide labels from your database of artwork. If not, you can use Microsoft Word to print labels from an Excel list of artwork, with one field for each part of the label. Or download these instructions on printing slide labels in Word.

My photo lab, E-Six Lab in Atlanta, Georgia, will do a "premium scan" to produce files of about 4MB, enough for a 5x8 print at 300dpi. I have an Epson Perfection 3200 scanner, which may do as well. When I try the Epson I’ll report on results here.

It’s these digital files that you’ll use for email and web use. Editing and resizing them is a complete topic in itself. I’ll just mention again that I like PhotoShop Elements v2 for this. Its "Save for Web" features are very good, in my opinion easier to use than PaintShopPro v6. Elements seems to resize and compress photo files with very attractive results and fast download speeds.

For just a few prints from a slide, a Cibachrome print is ideal. You’ll need a different lab for this. Or you may find a lab that makes excellent negatives from slides. This is more expensive than a direct print for just one or two prints, but then you’ll have the negative and can have more prints made as needed.