I had about 6,000 family photos to digitize. I gave around 100 photos to various professional scanning/printing stores in the Southern Suburbs of Athens. It took 1-2 weeks for the batch of 100 photos to be processed, and they charged between 0.20 and 2.00 euros per photo, so a batch of 100 photos cost between 20 - 200 euros. Considering the number of photos I had, the cost was over 1,000 euros and would have taken many months to complete.

- In the end, I bought the Epson FF-680W.
- I set it to 600dpi for regular-sized photos and 1200dpi (which is interpolated) for very small-sized photos.
- I load the feeder with 30-50 photos at a time.
- Obviously, I removed all the photos from their albums, as they need to be placed individually. This took up most of my time. After removing them from the albums, I discarded them as they were taking up unnecessary space.
- At 600dpi, it takes about 2-3 seconds per photo without supervision, as long as there are no serious issues with the photo (strong adhesive, tearing, photos stuck together, etc.). The scanner handles them perfectly. If you choose 300dpi, it is even faster (about 1 second per photo), but for archiving purposes, I recommend at least 600dpi.
- With the Epson FastFoto software (I use it on Windows 10), it produces a copy for each photo with automatic adjustments to brightness, colors, etc. For me, who just wants to digitize old photos as a hobby, the processed version is excellent. Especially the removal of red tones in photos over 40 years old is often surprisingly good.
- If you choose, it automatically scans the back of each photo and if it detects any information (based on a threshold set by the user), it creates an extra file with the contents of the back. This is useful if the photos have notes, dates, etc. on the back.
- I used it purely via wifi and it connected easily.
- In each batch of photos, I often included different sizes of photos that were not perfectly aligned, yet the final image was aligned and cropped to the correct dimensions.

Negatives:
- It makes many mistakes in detecting the orientation of the photos. You will likely need to manually rotate (90 or 180 degrees) the generated files, although there are thousands of programs that allow you to do this in bulk and very quickly.
- I did not bother at all with separating the photos into groups with exactly the same size, so some that I placed completely crooked were straightened by 98% and not 100%, meaning you can see a slight outline. Personally, I don't care and didn't bother to crop them with more detail.

In one week, I have scanned 5,000 photos. Once I finish, I will lend it to friends. It would be a shame for it to go unused :)

I highly recommend it for digitizing a family photo archive.