Recently I scanned all 1,100 rolls of film that my father and I took, for a total of 31,600 frames. For the 35mm film I used a Nikon Super CoolScan 5000 ED, and

Recently I scanned all 1,100 rolls of film that my father and I took, for a total of 31,600 frames. For the 35mm film I used a Nikon Super CoolScan 5000 ED, and for the medium format rolls I used an Epson Perfection 2480 photo scanner (flatbed). I had purchased these scanners about 20 years ago, but they are still going strong and produce great quality scans. They are slow and require manually feeding each strip of film; every frame takes about a minute to scan and process, especially if you enable filtering to enhance image quality. The Epson is also great at scanning prints, although I had negatives for most of what I scanned so I didn't need to scan many prints. After scanning everything, my endgame was to look through all the images, copy the best into a separate folder, crop and edit them, and produce a book. I made a dozen copies of the book and mailed them to all my relatives. The original negs are stored safely away, and I have a hard drive (with multiple backups) available in the event somebody wants me to send them a scan. Long story short, I would take the time to do it manually. Even with an automated scanner, the chances of things going wrong is fairly high, especially if your prints vary greatly in size and condition (bends, warps, etc.). Yes, it is a ton of work, but the end results are worth it. If 10+ seconds per photo is too much for you, just bite the bullet and send them out to a scanning service.