I have a portable scanner and scan both the fronts and the backs of the pictures. If they aren’t labeled, I do that first. It doesn’t take all that long to do a big stack and would be faster if I had more than one protective sleeve. They are saved by year and side of the family since I have scanned most of the MIL’s old photos also.
I had saved all of my old negatives (back to 1984 when I got my 35mm camera), so also scanned those. They are saved by year.
My dad scanned all of his negatives so each of the six of us have copies of those.
They are all on DVD’s, portable hard drives, SD cards and the best printed.
My dad had a 16mm silent movie camera and there were many reels from as far back as the 50s including shots of me as a little baby. I had (have) a hard time converting them and was generally told to project it on a white screen and just video it, perhaps with some commentary. That’s when I realized practically all the rolls are warped and really brittle and break every couple of feet, so it’s a lost cause. I don’t know of any way of salvaging any of it.
I started a similar project a while ago. Since the scansnap was NOT recommended for pictures, I used a couple of flat scanners. In the end, that is just too much and I went back to the scansnap and assumed the risk to mess up a few pictures. Simply stated, I would NOT think about using anything slower than the Fujitsu. It IS really good and makes an abominable project acceptable. I ended up using a date sorting with an index like Germany 699 or Chrismas 07. One could go crazy with extensive labels.
I also bought a scanner for slides, but that was just a royal waste.
An outside company would be very expensive. The fast scanner is the best office tool ever.
Back in 1986, D1 was in a television PSA for the Red Cross - I had been volunteering there when I was pregnant with her, and right after she was born, they needed a baby to demonstrate being properly put into a car seat, so they asked me if we would do it. They gave us a copy of the PSA on a VHS, and we had looked at it a couple of times over the years. But a couple of years ago, I took it, along with a bunch of other VHS tapes to be transferred, and they told us the quality was so poor, they couldn’t capture anything. So yea, it didn’t break, but even watching the VHS was useless… I was kind of sad when I realized we wouldn’t be able to see it again. Wish I had had it converted a few years earlier when we might have been able to salvage it.