Maximum PC

My parents have over 1000's of photos in storage in bins and photobooks. I was curious if anyone knew of any scanner that could scan a batch of photos instead of doing it one by one by hand. I just want to have a digital backup of all they have.

That's actually a question I was about to ask. I'm getting a bunch of photos to document, but you know how most treat the negatives and usually just toss them out (and that most of the negative feeders for scanners are thrown away with the box it came in).

What I've been doing with the few (100?) I have as a primer is just scanning all I can fit on the bed and then cropping them. It works, but it's a slow manual process that I do stack by stack as I'm screwing around. Thanks for the company tips Kleink, I'm really going to ask some photobugs on quality/cost now that you mention them (1st is of course Chris Marquardt).

Old photo's are all precious of course, but I also wonder how some of these old pictures take to these manufacturer's scanning procedures and handling. I've got a pic of me sitting between my Dad and Johnny Cash ("One piece at a time" build) and I won't scan it thinking I may degrade it; so I don't want others to just half-heartedly run it through their machine and spit it back to me. And then there's the paranoia of the Mail system itself...do I really want to send it through that hell of a system to get scanned by a pro?