The love of scanner software
If you want to capture your photo images with as much detail as possible, a 24 bit sampling document scanner would be the one to go for. If you need even more detail from your photographs, you may have to spend more for a dedicated photo document scanner. These types of scanners usually come with a comprehensive set of features that make it remarkably easy to get your images into the computer. In fact, many manufacturers routinely bundle a fairly respectable set of image editing software tools with these types of scanners. If you want to be able to work with the text from the documents that you scan, you will want to look for a document scanner with OCR or Optical Character Recognition capability.