You can digitise slides without a dedicated slide scanner by backlighting each slide and photographing it with your phone, though a proper slide scanner will generally give sharper, more colour-accurate results for a large collection.
What you need
- Slides to digitise
- A bright, even light source: a tablet or phone screen showing a plain white image, a lightbox, or a bright overcast sky
- Your phone camera
- Somewhere steady to hold or prop up the phone and slide
A practical workaround, not a replacement
This is a practical workaround, not a replacement for a proper slide scanner if you have hundreds of slides and want the best possible quality — for a small or occasional batch, though, it’s a genuinely usable option.
How to digitise slides without a scanner
- Set up a bright, even light source. A tablet or phone displaying a plain white screen works well, or a dedicated lightbox if you have one. Avoid a light source with visible texture or colour tint.
- Hold or prop the slide directly in front of the light source. The slide should be flat against or very close to the light, with the light shining through it toward your camera.
- Photograph the slide from directly in front, filling the frame. Get your phone as close as it can focus while still filling the frame mostly with the slide image, to capture the most detail.
- Adjust your phone’s exposure for the slide, not the background. Tap on the slide image itself in your camera app to set focus and exposure there, since backlit shots can otherwise come out too dark.
- Check focus and colour on a larger screen before moving to the next slide. Slides are small, so a slightly out-of-focus shot might not be obvious on your phone’s own screen; check a few periodically on a bigger display.
- Crop and straighten each image afterwards. Most photos will need cropping to the slide’s edges and a small rotation to straighten, either in your phone’s editor or on a computer afterwards.
Check colour and sharpness look right
Zoom into the digitised image at full size and check faces or fine detail are reasonably sharp, and colours look natural rather than tinted from the light source.
If results look flat or washed out
If colours consistently look off, try a different light source (daylight through a window rather than a screen, for example), since some screens have a colour tint that transfers to the photo.
Next step
Once your slides are digitised, it’s worth deciding what to do with the physical negatives and slides afterwards — see What to do with negatives once the prints are already digitised.
Sources and date checked
General DIY slide-digitising technique based on common backlighting photography advice; a dedicated slide scanner will generally outperform this method for large collections or archival-quality needs. Checked 22 September 2026.