Quote:
I don't see how it saves time to take out the pictures and scan them in individually.

Because when you're working with high resolution scans, the files sizes can get so huge as to make photoshop (or whatever software package you're using) run out of memory and start swapping really hard. A full page scan at high resolution would tend to do that pretty much every time.

Now, if you're scanning everything at low rez, it doesn't matter as much. Since you seemed to be OK with scanning right through the plastic sheet, you were probably OK with low rez as well.

Another thing that doing the individual photos would help is, if you're doing batch processing on the images, it allows you to skip the step of cutting the images up with mouse movements. Once you get your workflow down, it's possible to get everything done with keystrokes, scripts, and macros, which is much faster than mousing around, trying to draw cropping rectangles, and typing new file names for each re-crop. With loose photos, all that stuff is already done automatically.
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Tony Fabris