During some recent cleaning, I found some of those little, single-pic, ‘slide viewers’. (I think that’s what they’re called. Googling that term turns up mostly larger systems that can be loaded with multiple slides which are mounted in cardboard frames.)
The things I found are little (2 to 3 inch-long) plastic tubes each holding a single photographic slide at the wider end. They’re sealed–they’re not designed for the slides to be swapped out. You look through the narrow end and hold it up to a light to view the image.
The images are my family, my friends, and myself, taken at vacation spots.
I’d like to get digital scans of the images. Does anyone have experience at this? Could a Staples or Office Depot handle it? Or would it require a more specialized print shop?
Sounds like a keychain photo viewer to me. Something like this?
On the ones that I have, the front piece does snap off and you can lift the slide out and scan it. If it’s truly sealed, you could probably get a semi-acceptable image (well, mediocre, anyway) with your cellphone by holding it up to the lens.
And I doubt the ones I have are truly sealed, because the company that made them would approach potential customers (e.g., on the beach in Ocean City, MD, or Hershey Park) and take lots of pictures, develop the slides, and create the viewers. The customer would then come by the company’s premises later to look at the images and decide which ones they wanted to buy.
If a customer chose not to buy a particular viewer, I would assume that the company could pop the viewer open to reuse it. Otherwise, they would waste a lot of viewers.
I would say almost certainly openable. We got one decades ago at Sea World. They would take your picture, then you would go to a booth later in the day to view it. The keychain viewer was the viewing mechanism. If you liked the picture they would make prints for you, or you could just buy the viewer. This was years before scanners, so they must have removed the slide from the viewer to make the prints.
