The 1,683 slides project updated 27 February 2026

In 2023 we began what we thought would be an interesting and straightforward project to digitise several boxes of slides that had been donated to the Society by Hilda Holmes, Kate Mason, Don Barrett and Arnold Pacey – some 1800 in total. It turned out that there were a number of duplicates and we eventually reckoned there were 1683 slides that we had digitised by a professional slide converting company.

Of course like any significant project this one proved to be a bigger challenge than we perhaps realised – not quite up there with HS2, but certainly on a par with the moon shot.

Many of the slides from Hilda Holmes and Kate Mason were grouped together as presentations to the Civic Society and other local organisations. Fortunately a lot of these slides had some notes or comments written on them which helped to identify their location since obviously the presenters knew where they were, but for us it became a bit of a guessing game to identify many of the unlabelled images, and certainly it was a test of our local knowledge of Addingham and the immediate vicinity.

To begin the process of sorting these images Don Barrett put together a procedure to help match the new images with what was already in the Archive (remember that what the user sees online is a fraction of the images we actually have altogether, roughly 6,000 can be seen online as a selection from about 17,000 in total). This was a real challenge since the descriptions on quite a lot of the slides didn’t really match the descriptions of the images we have in the Archive already and a significant number didn’t have descriptions anyway!

So by the start of 2026 we had matched up about two thirds of the images and identified some very interesting images that really added to the story of Addingham and its development. A selection of these new images have now been included in the Collections that users can access and search online with the remainder being added to the 17,000 that are stored waiting their day to be included. The team sees the end may be in sight, and certainly expect this to be before the completion of HS2!

Two of the brand new images:

Low Mill, Old End Yard in the 1970’s	Gliding on Beamsley Beacon in the 1930’s