I tried using a sheet-fed scanner (Brother, for what it is worth) for lots of photos and the results were not good. I could only load about 10 photos in at one time, and then it often pulled more than one at a time. Then I had to go back and rescan the ones it missed. So, I used my Canon flatbed scanner with great results. Don't know about other manufacturers, but Canon has a feature called "multi-scan" where you can put as many photos on the platen as will fit, and it will scan each one as an individual item. Was ultimately much faster for me than the sheet-fed. I scanned almost 3,000 photos this way.
Just a hint for you. If you will organize your photos into categories, and smaller "batches" and scan them a batch at a time, you will save a lot of time and trouble. I'd scan maybe 50 or so, import them into iPhoto, clean them up, name them, etc. and then start the scanning again. Much easier in my opinion to organize before scanning.
There are also online sites that will do the scanning for you. The least expensive one I found was scanmyphotos.com. They said they would do 1,000 for $49.95. Got good reviews from users, but ultimately, I did my own.
