A Raspberry Pi-Based Device to View and Convert Old Film Negatives

This is going to shock our younger readers, but taking photos used to be quite an ordeal. You’d have to load up your camera with a roll of film, snap photos without knowing if they actually turned out well, and then pay some teenager at a drug store to develop those photos while you crossed your fingers and hoped for the best. Film also wasn’t particularly cheap. Put all of those factors together, and it’s easy to understand why photos used to be a precious thing. If you find yourself in possession of collection of sentimental negatives, you can build this Raspberry Pi-based device to view them and convert them to digital formats.

This project was designed by Instructables user Random_Canadian, who needed a quick way to sort through hundreds of old film negatives and convert the ones that were worth keeping. There are devices on the market built specifically to do that, but they tend to be pretty expensive. You can also use an app on your phone, but that’s a labor intensive process that doesn’t yield particularly good results. This unit is relatively affordable, and is much easier to use than a smartphone app. Most importantly, the quality of the converted photos is a lot better than what you’d get with an app.

The device is built around a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and a Raspberry Pi Camera Module. The camera faces down into a small chamber where the film negative is placed. A cone-shaped bit is used to frame the negative. Diffused white LEDs inside of that chamber light the negative. All of that and the Raspberry Pi is housed within a 3D-printed enclosure that has two buttons on top. A Python script is used to capture a photo when the green button is pressed, and exit the script when the red button is pressed. Photos are stored on an USB drive, which is the red and black codex-looking part you see in some of the tutorial pictures. If you have film negatives that you need to convert, this device is one great solution.