I used a scanner with a document feeder for same-size photos. It wasn't the greatest quality, but sufficient for our needs.

It would have been way too much to use a flatbed scanner.

I have some more to do now, but stuffed if I can find the scanner in our messy garage!

La Penguina used https://photomyne.com/

She photographed all photos with her phone and then downloaded them from their web site . The app does keystone correction etc.

Quality looked about the same as using our Brother scanner.

Flicking through many before turfing the originals, it really struck me how many of us are poor photographers. Nice photo of some people on the beach but why go back 50 feet to take it? You can barely make out the faces of the subjects.

if your collection is like what i have, one of the earlier things to deal with is sorting them somehow. mine is mostly a jumbled mess where even film strips (cut in 4 or 6 frames) are not always grouped with the same roll of film that they came from. i guess some of them got reprinted/enlarged and didn't find their way back into the same sleeve.

on the process, i have found that there are at least two ways to go about this:

• digitise quickly and share
• get the best (archival) quality to preserve them for future generations

i took the second approach, and have been chipping away at it for a few years now, as time permits. they're all in my lightroom catalog, currently saying there are >2400 of them. where i have film (negatives / positive slides) i scan those with a nikon coolscan v (110/135), or epson 4180 for the odd MF/LF film. most of the prints were scanned with the epson 4180, but i have a few done recently with the scanner of an epson ET-8550. still considering an epson ff-680w for the more generic (a bit less than the special ones) prints to scan.

time consumed depends a lot on the source material and, unfortunately for me, a lot of my source were not looked after. for film in good shape, it takes me about 15 minutes per frame (positive or negative), the damaged ones take several orders of magnitude longer. off the top of my head, one of the oldest i've done is that of my grandfather from 1942 - best guess really, as his generation and the one after that have all moved on from this world.

elpenguino's comment is also 100% correct. you soon realise that most of the stuff you're working on are snapshots rather than photographs. however, they still retain sentimental value - family you'll never get to see, or talk to, again.