I get this answer a lot when I ask similar question but how do we scan it?

Taking a Photos of every print out from our Phone? That is 1000s of photos each needing to snap and focus.

Not everyone has a scanner, and not every scanner has automated tray feed. And even if they do the quality of their scan are really low by default.

I have similar question with Business Cards as well. I have hundreds if not thousands of them. But with no way to automatically archive them.

The only realistic way is to have a scanner with an automated feeder (which aren’t really all that expensive). I invested in a laser color printer years ago and I have not yet had to replace the toner. Otherwise you can also do it at your office or business centers at hotels (I’ve done this a few times and they don’t really care/notice). Worst case scenario would be a fedex location but that can get pricey very quickly since they charge by the sheet.

I use https://1dollarscan.com/ if I don't need the physical items back, and use https://www.scancafe.com/ if I do. Those digital files then get ingested into my workflow.

(no affiliation, just a customer)

I’ve used scancafe a number of times and actually wrote an early-on review for CNET.

One general piece of advice is that before you go crazy, think about what you really care about saving. There’s a cost to scanning of course. There’s also a cost to metadata and other cataloging so that you can actually find what you’ve scanned.

For photos everything is in Lightroom with at least a modicum of organization. When my dad decided he’d like a digital picture frame of older family pics it literally took me about 30 minutes to pull together.

This is a good point. For my use cases, I get a bulk rate, and dump everything into digital storage and a processing workflow. Once digital, it's a future problem, but at least it'll be preserved on disk and tape somewhere. Apple didn't have machine vision in photos when I started doing this, for example, so I lean heavily on Moore's Law (very broadly speaking about tech acceleration) that future tech will solve (facial recognition, OCR, machine vision metadata generation, generative AI) so save, digitize, preserve now when it is cheap to do so. Once gone, it is lost to the sands of time.

It’s certainly use case specific. In my case, less is more. A fairly heavily-curated collection of photos is more valuable to me than a data dump that may preserve some diamond in the rough that future tech may do something interesting with.

Photos of a historically interesting event? Sure. But for old family pics I’m happy to have hundreds of curated photos of mostly people and call it a day.

FedEx has large self-serve scanner/copiers where you just load up the pages and let it rip.

If you have an iPhone, the scan feature of the stock iOS file explorer is quite good. Just hover the phone on top of the documents and it auto-detects, crops and combines them into a pdf.