Before we had kids, I used a 35mm camera and shot slides. When the kids came along, I switched to printed photos since they were easier to show/share. Those photos have been sitting in a box, still in their original store envelopes. I have a printer that's a 4 in 1 machine, but it's a pain lifting the lid for each photo. A few years ago, I bought a neat little slide scanner to scan all my old slides into digital format. I then sent it to my FIL because he had a ton of slides he wanted to transfer to digital.  Last week, I bought a neat little scanner for up to 4"X6" photos. It will also do negatives and slides (not as fast or as good as the slide scanner I previously had). The resolution was supposed to be 300dpi. However, when it arrived, it had the ability to do either 300dpi or 600dpi. I've already scanned about 500 photos and it works great! You can switch from 300dpi to 600dpi (or back) with a push of a button depending on the quality of the photo you're scanning. All I've had to do was clean the rollers and scanner plate periodically with the provided tools and instructions (takes about 2-3 minutes). I highly recommend this little photo scanner!http://www.amazon.com/Pandigital-Photolink-One-Touch-PANSCN05-x6-Inches/dp/B0035WTCTU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405913964&sr=8-1&keywords=PANSCN05It comes with a power cord, USB cord, 1GB card, cleaning tools, etc. The actual model that I received was PANSCN05R. I don't know if it was a mistake or they are replacing the PANSCN05 with a newer model, but I'm happy.It goes pretty fast on 300dpi, but slows down for 600dpi. Still faster than using a flatbed scanner. Since it feeds the photos through the scanner, the photos should be flat and unbent and clean. They provide a plastic sheaf if a photo is bent, but all of mine have gone through with no problem.If anyone needs to scan a bunch of photos, I highly recommend this little scanner!
@Retired_Engineer: The Photo kiost in Sams Club has a scanner with a drop-down hopper feeder.. It scans and burns upto 200 prints on a CD for $2.24. The price is right, and the labor is close to nil, because all you have to do is to feed the hopper.
That said, all pictures are given a file name which is a string of numbers. One day - some day - I plan to copy them to my hard drive, look at each photo, give it a desciptive file name then burn them on to another CD. 4951