Fixing 10,000 Upside-Down Scanned Slides with a Local Vision LLM

My grandfather had about 10,000 35mm slides. I rented a SlideSnap X1 and spent a weekend feeding them through — 33 boxes worth, organized into folders by box. The scanner itself was great, but when you’re pushing through thousands of slides in a weekend, some inevitably go in upside down or backwards. No metadata, no EXIF orientation flags — just thousands of JPEGs, some right-side up, some not, sitting on a NAS. ...

February 23, 2026 · 7 min · Rusty Bower