How to Preserve Physical Photos

Related question: what's the best way to digitize a collection of physical photos for personal use?

I ran into this problem recently for a family reunion where we wanted a slideshow of photos that were decades old. The best solution was to manually scan them using Google Photoscan which involves taking a 5 pictures of each photo with a phone and letting the app remove reflection, perform skew correction, crop, etc. This resulted in better photos than just using the phone's default camera software, but it still took 10+ seconds for each photo.

Does anyone have an recommendation for at home photoscanners that would allow me to drop a stack of photos into it and have it automatically scan them? I found various devices on Amazon that target this use case but they all have drawbacks like low resolution or excessive manual work. Has anyone done this with their family's old photos?

All my sibling comments have lots of good info.

Clean anything before you scan, as best you can, while being careful. I used to do this professionally many years ago, but I don't remember the products. I had a bunch of different cleaning sprays, brushes and cloths. Different sprays melt different emulsions on photos and negatives, so always test in unimportant area before use.

I would also say to keep the unprocessed original scans, before any dust/scratch removal, color correction etc, since post-processing techniques are in a rapid state of flux lately.

I was lucky enough to use one of these $25K beasts:

https://www.filmscanner.info/en/HasselbladFlextightX5.html

The problem was the algorithms for removing dust and scratches in bulk. Look up what the latest tech is there. Always color correct old photos and negatives. They will have faded in some way. Use white point and black point tools to hint the software and you'll get 95% of the way there if you can find bright white and very dark spots in a photo. If you are properly serious, then make sure to use hardware to color calibrate your scanning tool and your editing monitor. Use something like an IT8 target:

https://www.silverfast.com/products-overview-products-compan...

And something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Datacolor-SpyderX-Pro-Calibration-Pho...

Save all your originals in some uncompressed TIFF/RAW/DNG format.