Before I switched to digital in 1994 I shot slides, about 25,000 over decades.  At first I stored them in Bell & Howell SlideCubes, plastic boxes 2-1/4" on a side. A slide cube holds about 40 slides -- one roll.  The projector displays the slides sequentially, then returns them to the cube.  A box of 16 cubes - 640 slides - is only about the size of a carousel box, and holds 5 times as many slides.  I had to abandon this compact and convenient system because of infuriating projector jams that persuaded me switch to carousels despite their high space demands.  I accumulated 75 carousels,  and still had a couple dozen boxes of cubes (16 rolls each box).  Lotta slides.  They are about evenly divided between Kodachrome and its competitors.

I use a Nikon 5000-ED film scanner, at 4000 pixels/inch.  The resulting files have 20-25 M pixels.  The scanner and its software are quite sophisticated - for example, the software will remove dust, detecting it with IR, to which dust is opaque, while most (!) emulsions are IR-transparent .  That's the one option I actually use, because it's not too slow, and it works wonders.  The scanner will do much more, optionally, such as scan a slide multiple times and compare results to distinguish signal from noise.  It will scan with controllable exposure, focus (which is normally automatic), and color-balance specifications.  And it will store the result in a variety of formats.  This process, with my selection of options, takes about 75 seconds per slide.  I'm feeding the slides into the scanner with Nikon's 50-slide bulk feeder, which adds another 20-30 seconds per slide.   Bottom line: a roll of film fits nicely in the feeder and takes nearly two hours, including the time required to load the feeder, blowing dust off each slide.  I've read a lot of scary stuff on the net about jams using this bulk feeder.  I think those people ought to learn how to use it better.  The only jams I have now are with warped or bent slides.

Storing the digital images is a significant issue, because the image files are large and there are a lot of them.  The raw TIF format with 16 bit color values requires about 120M bytes per image.  With 8-bit color (surely adequate to represent Kodachrome colors), the size drops to about 60M.  If the images are stored as JPEG files the size depends on the compression.  The software supports JPEG files of about 20M, about 5M, and several sizes yet smaller.  I find that for most slides I can't see the difference between the 5M JPEG and the 120M TIF unless I enlarge a small part of the image, and even then the difference is marginal.  My approach is to scan everything to 5M jpegs, and re-scan the occasional pictures for which it's justified.  I keep an unmodified original copy as well as the modified copy.  On the other hand, I delete unworthy images completely. My first 4500 scans occupy only 30G of storage, less than 7M per scanned slide overall.

I modify most of the scanned results.  Cropping, color balancing, and light-level adjustment takes a minute or two per slide.  For some exceptional images I do quite a bit more.  Consider the pair below.

After correcting the colors in the original (as I do to almost every slide), I saved several versions, at different exposure levels, and combined them with the Highlights/Shadows merge operation in Photomatix Pro, a tool used by the high-dynamic-range photo community.  I then adjust colors, contrasts, and light levels in the result, which ends up with improved shadow detail (distant mountains), improved highlight detail (ridge in left middleground), and better sharpness overall.  I spent 15 minutes on this slide, which is a view from the ridge of Bryce Cyn NP.

I do almost all this processing, and all the preparation of the web shows, with ACDsee Pro 3.  Every once in a while I'm forced to use Photoshop for some elaborate modification, but ACDsee's organizational system gives it a whole dimension beyond photoshop.

Many images will eventually appear on this web site.  I anticipate that working my way through the pile of slides will take at least a couple of years, depending on how much time I dedicate to the task. Then I can start on my old black & white negatives, which go back to when I was 9.