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?

I recently scanned several hundred photos with a simple Canon PIXMA scanner.

Their app is horrendous but it allowed me to connect my phone to the scanner and when you became used to the process you could scan one photo every ~10 seconds. The only movement you did was changing the photo in the scanner and hitting the Scan button.

Until you photos have a different format. I tended to save those in one pile and do them in one go because the app was just so bad, specifically when all you wanted to do was change the format.

But this is an old method, you could do this 10 years ago in the exact same way I bet.

After the scanning I had to run a script that cropped out all the white around some of the photos. (ImageMagick convert using the -trim and -fuzz options)