Batch / auto straighten & crop scans?

Photoshop Crop & Straighten, written many years ago, is relatively simple and very picky about a clear difference between the background and the items on the scanner. It can easily be confused by a non-uniform (textured, dirty…) background, photos packed together too closely on the scanner, ambiguous edges (torn edges, irregular borders), etc. It seems to work best if the original scans were done in a way optimized for the quirks of Corp & Straighten.

I have been using VueScan software for many years. Mostly with a film scanner, but more recently with family photo prints. Its Multi Crop feature can detect multiple frames in a filmstrip scanned on a flatbed scanner, or detect multiple prints scanned on a flatbed. For that last one, I seem to have better luck with VueScan Auto Crop + Multi Crop than with Photoshop Crop & Straighten. One reason I prefer Multi Crop is that it proposes multiple detected crop borders in the scan preview, then you can adjust the proposed crop borders in that preview, so that when you click the Scan button, it turns this into multiple final scan files exactly the way you told it to crop. The demo below shows how this works.

VueScan is not free and people balk at that, but for me personally, I chose their One-Time Payment option many years ago, and it paid for itself many times over because I do a lot of scanning and its Professional Edition scanning features are very deep — usually much better than the software that comes with a scanner. 

LAMY2017 asked about double-sided scanning. I was surprised to find out that is now a thing. Keith Cooper at Northlight Images has been writing about digital photography, scanning, and printing for many years, and a few months ago he did a rather detailed review of the Epson FF-680W, which can scan both sides of a print. It’s designed for bulk scanning. His review is linked below, and on that page you can also watch his YouTube video review of that scanner.

Epson FF-680W print scanner
Quickly scan both sides up to A4/letter

hhost, as long as we're asking for a miracle solution, double-sided scanning would be great. One of the difficult parts of scanning larger numbers of prints is turning the prints over to find ID, then naming the file (people)_yymmdd.jpg.

4 prints/scan = 250 passes, ignoring the crop & straighten/save as separate files.

In my experience, I minimized that mess by aligning the prints on the scanner glass as carefully as I could (at the cost of taking even more time).I saved the "contact-sheet file to go back to manually rotate and crop the files with which I had trouble.

Maybe look into buying or renting a dedicated photo scanner? [old name brand] digital film scanners on Amazon, $405US and up are possibilities. Skewing can occur when using motorized feeders [automatic document feeder], but it could be helpful.

For our sakes, maybe someone else in the community has a better solution.