Harry Horton posted a description of the process he went through. Then commented how it was easier now.
"Now I just had to get through all the physical photos. There were thousands of them. Feed scanners cost a fortune and flatbed scanners take an awful long time so I put technology to work and decided to scan them using my phone. When I started I had an iPhone 7+ which had a pretty good camera, and using the app Scannable it could straighten and crop the photos so they were virtually ready to process without image editing. Even so the process of “pick up camera, take image, put down camera, move photos to the side, and replace it with the next photo”, was quite long winded and didn’t get the best results. So I built myself a lightbox. A cardboard box, bottom up with a hole cut out in the top(bottom) where I could lay the phone and the camera could look through the hole. Inside the box I used an LED rope light (£10 off ebay) and stuck it to the walls of the box to give the proper illumination and positioned low down to prevent reflections. Then right at the bottom of the box, where the lip touched the table I cut out recesses so images could be fed in from one side and taken out the other. The Scannable app takes a shot whenever it finds a rectangular object in front of it, so I didn’t even need to touch the phone. Position photo in centre of lightbox directly underneath camera, app snaps an image, take photo out and position the next one. This way I could get through one hundred photos in 10-20 minutes. And to be honest the results were pretty damn good. OK, not professional digital archiving, but certainly a lasting family record that could be shared with others.
I worked through the physical photos like this in batches. Once a batch was scanned it was moved into PhotoMill, dated and geotagged then in to Photos and the people tagged before moving on to the next batch. For the older photos it becomes more difficult to know when or where they were taken and all you can do is infer the year and place, but it is still worth trying to date and tag every single one. If you have no idea of the location (such as a studio portrait which many very old photos are) then pick a default location such as the centre of the town where your family historically resided.
I went through a similar process for slides although I had to use a proper scanner for them, I had a Canon 9000F Mk II which did a good job, I also used this for scanning very important photos if I wanted very good quality. Once this was complete I had a full record of 19,000 photos of my whole family for 150 years and right around the globe and by uploading them from Photos to iCloud they are all with me everywhere I go in a portable easily searchable format. The earliest photo on my phone is dated 1853.
Archiving It is now essential that all this work is safely backed up.
Personally, I used my smart phone and a Shotbox (cost about $175) to do digitize many documents when access to scanners wasn't available. Many local public libraries, college libraries, as well as FamilySearch libraries and Discovery Centers have automatic feed and flat bed scanners. Some also have the ability to digitize slides and negatives.
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