Going through an estate, and discovered 2 totes full of photos. I will certainly keep some of the more important photos, but 95% of the rest take up more space than they're worth. Looking for some sort of ADF photo scanner, if a decent version exists. A flat bed would take forever, but is a last resort. EPSON FastFoto FF-680W is one that came up on Amazon, but not a lot else.

I made my own contraption. If you have a DSLR cameras and a sharp lens you can get better than scanner results, and its easier to tweak the images in a program like Adobe Lightroom.
I screwed a monitor pole to a piece of plywood that was about 2x2 ft. Monitor pole being one of those thing where you can put a two monitors on top of each other.  The pole came with a couple of arms that would attach to a monitor. Instead I bolted a camera mount to that, put the camera in the mount. Basically the camera was looking straight down at the board. I covered the board with black felt and put the pictures on the felt.
I used an 85mm lens because it was the sharpest thing i had. It wouldn't focus that close so I had to add extension tubes but that was no big deal. I also bought 4 cheap led lights desk lamps at wal fart and put those on both side shining light at as flat an angle as possible. This let me shoot at low iso's without super slow shutter speed. My camera had an hdmi out, so i ran that to a small tv that i could have on the same table. That let me manual focus and get it incredibly sharp, even with a thin depth of field.

Sometimes the picture would not lay flat. For those, I took a piece of glass out of a picture frame, cleaned the shit out of it, so no streaks, smears, etc and put that on top of the pictures to mash them flat.
Total cost, not counting camera, lens, and camera mount, that I already had, was under $100.
Oh I also C Clamped the board to the table just to try to take out any chance of vibration induced blur.

I don't.

In the past, when I'd find an envelope of photos, I'd just use my flatbed scanner. But this is an exponentially higher order of magnitude, quantity wise.

I have an earlier version, the FF-640.

If you take the time to pre-sort images into stacks of the same sizes, and stacks of the same sizes needing both sides scanned, it can go fairly fast.

One problem I've run into using the scanner.  Sometime of the '80s/ '90s prints I inherited from family were made with a slick high-gloss finish on the print surface.  All of those I've tried to scan tend to slip on the feed rollers, and it causes elongation distortion of the scanned image.  I have to do those prints on the flatbed.  Older gloss prints haven't been a problem.

Good to know! I hate to fork over the cash, but sounds like it'll save a lot of shitting around with a flatbed.

*off to ebay to see if I can find a gently used ff-640*

Good luck.

I looked at the "send them away" scanning options before I started my archival project.  I inherited at least 8 plastic tubs and 4 cardboard boxes, 18 photo albums, 2 over-filled slide briefcases, and multiple hardcase notebooks with archival slide and negative sheets.  Thousands of prints, negatives, and slides.  The cost to send all of that for scanning by someone else was in the multiple hundreds of dollars, and add in the risk of something happening to the images enroute or bad scanning, and it didn't make sense to me.  I caught the FF on a sale and bought new, already had the flatbed.  There are some oversize prints I'll need to take to an office store with large scanners, saving those for last.

Been working on it off and on as I have time over the last 6 years.  I'm down to 4 plastic tubs, one hardcase, and two cardboard boxes.  Even with the FF, it's time-consuming when combined with all the other stuff going on.  I can't wait to get done with the photos and start digitizing all of the important family & personal paperwork and documents.