It depends on what you wish to do with them as well, but you can get a scanner, which will scan in what you wish for less than $150 which is rated for photos, and produces up to 6400 DPI. It’s more about how you save them, some formats which compress them more will make them lose some resolution, but depending on what you’re doing with them that might not be an issue.
About 30 years ago, I sat down with a packing box full of old pictures, probably close to 1,000, and scanned most of them in with a flatbed scanner, and created a book we had printed for their 50th wedding anniversary. It was very time consuming, a month of weekends or so, {my old scanner took 4 – 5 minutes to scan an 8 x 10 picture}, but I had a blast. I got to go through pictures taken from as far back as early 1900’s, of my grandparents as teens. I even found some inexpensive software that helped me repair some of the photo’s after scanning them in. I currently use a Microtek ScanMaker 5900 which takes about a minute to scan in a photo with considerable detail. It is only 2400 DPI and I’ve never had any issues. I haven’t had much luck with the Film Reader on it but in fairness only tried it once and the slides weren’t that good.
So if you have the time it can be fun and scanners have lots of other uses, especially when you have children in school. A few suggestions from experience if you choose to do it yourself:
Do some research on scanners before you buy, I think a flatbed is best for pics, but that’s just my opinion. The higher the DPI the better the resolution, and usually the larger the file size, which is what got me in trouble years ago, I learned what happens when you completely fill a hard drive, but that was when hard drives were measured in Megabytes, not Gigabytes, or Terabytes. That’s not as much a problem now but with thousands of pictures, that could be a lot of space. Another feature for scanners is OCR, {Optical character recognition}, which converts scanned text into editable text using Word or some other word processing software, it’s a handy tool if you get it.
When you start out, pick out a variety of photos and play around with them before you start scanning in the bulk. That way you can play around with the settings and find out what gives you the best desired outcome for what you want to do.
Lastly figure out your plan for sorting or organizing them, there is some inexpensive software out there to organize and edit them. I use Photo Director 6, but that’s for the editing. I have a 1 terabyte storage drive organized specifically for my Pics, they mostly come from my camera, but there is some neat software out there. If you’re a Facebook fan, there’s even one’s out there that put tags on them for you, I’m not the Facebook type, but my wife is. And once you get them all in, back them up, I lost a lot of old photos when a hard drive failed and I hadn’t back them up elsewhere, one of those learning moments.
My apologies for the verbose reply, and I’m by no means a professional, just a DIY guy that thought you might want an opinion from a different point of view.
