If you like fast and easy, Google PhotoScan will suit your photo digitizing needs. The interface is simple and to-the-point – all PhotoScan does is scan photos, but in a way that virtually avoids the dreaded glare. The app prompts you to position a photo within the frame before pressing the shutter button.
When the four white dots appear, your job is to move the smartphone so that the center reticle aligns with each dot, one by one. PhotoScan takes the five snapshots and stitches them together, thereby correcting perspective and eliminating glare. Photomyne excels at automatically detecting edges, cropping, and rotating photos – you can still go in and make manual adjustments if desired. There’s also the option to include names, dates, locations, and descriptions on photos. The overall color accuracy is good, although other apps do a better job at minimizing the amount of noise/grain. Photomyne limits the number of free albums for non-subscribing users, but you can easily export (e.g., Dropbox, Box, etc.) all digitized photos for safekeeping.
If scans are the main priority, and if you have a steady hand, flat surface, and ample lighting, Microsoft’s Office Lens app is choice. Although the description touts keywords of productivity, documents, and business, the app does have a photo-capture mode that doesn’t apply enhanced saturation and contrast (these are ideal for recognizing text within documents). But most importantly, Office Lens lets you choose the camera’s scanning resolution – a feature omitted by other scanning apps – all the way to the maximum your device is capable of.
Photoshop’s File→Automate menu offers a neat time-saving feature named Crop and Straighten Photos, which generates a separate file for each photo it finds in the scan.For best results, place the photos on the scanner’s bed with a slight gap between them. You might like to place a sheet of colored paper or plastic on top of the photos, between the backs of the photos and the scanner’s lid (as you see in this figure).Use paper or plastic that is a very different color from any color found along the edges of the photos.
This gives Photoshop a good idea about where each photo ends and the next begins.
Needless to say, that is going to be a lot of work. I have scanned many photos on flatbed scanners over the years and I have always wanted a software that could do multi-autocropping. Currently, I have to save the scan as a single file, and then open it in a photo editor and cut out each individual picture and save it. So you can create (and even save) one scan area definition set for each cardboard template, and press 'Scan batch list' to get your multiple images from the template. However, for a large set of images this is much slower because the scanner will move back to the zero position after processing one scan area. (At least that happens with my scanner.