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?

My older family photos are too important to me — I scanned each one, individually, on a flatbed scanner.

Having said that though, occasionally if there was a sheet from a photo album where several photos were glued down, I canned the whole page of the photo album itself rather than risk damaging the photos by removing them.

FWIW, if a photo album is in my care, I first go through and photograph each whole page of the photo album, turning each page in order, so as to capture the layout of the photo album, order, and perhaps comments under each photo.

I do then carefully dissect the album so as to scan each individual photo (at 600 DPI as suggested in the article) and then to permanently store the photos in plastic sleeves. Photo sleeves then go into an album that has a storage box for it.

For dead relatives, I clean up the scans, fill out relevant metadata (date, description) and upload them to findagrave.com, ancestry.com, etc. The more places I can share the photos the better they'll both find other interested parties and likely outlive me. (My iCloud of course has a complete set of scans as do hard drives about.)

(Note: use Apple's Image Capture app that is included with MacOS, maybe an Epson scanner, Apple's Photos works well enough for me to retouch, adjust the finished scan ... older versions of Photos had a better retouch tool though so I keep an old High Sierra machine around just for photo retouching.)