Personal scanners have had quite a development cycle. I still have a
logitech roller scanner. And there was the business card scanner. So
why not a specialized picture scanner, with a good feed hopper, and
some good software?

I googled around & found nothing. So thought I'd check with the
experts.

Having just been through a similar exercise, it would have been a lot
faster with 2 features:
1) A sheet feeder that works well for small items (4x6 prints) and
doesn't bend them.  (I used a Visioneer 9450, but in the end it couldn't
reliably feed 4x6's... it's really for scanning documents).
2) Software to automatically crop each scan.

Sure, any flatbed will work, but it's quite repetitious.

I can place several photos on my Epson 4490 at a time and the software scans
them as so many different files. (and also straightens them if they are a
little askew)

I use a standard setting of 600 dpi for scanning prints just in case I need
to crop them a little. Works well and does not slow down the process unduly.

Gerrit

Speaking of the past, there's always the HP S-20 PhotoSmart USB scanner
which was around a few years ago. It will handle prints up to 5x7 as
well as doing strip negatives.

You feed prints into a slot in the front one at a time. Rollers pull
the prints through the scanner and eject them at the rear. It has a flat
feed path so the prints don't get bent. The print scan resolution is
only 300dpi though. Negs are scanned the same way, pulled through the
scanner by rollers but scanned with a special 2400dpi insert.

You can find them on Ebay quite cheap although you might have to hunt
around for software to drive them. Here's one I found for sale:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/36usm4

There was an earlier version, the S-10 which has an SCSI interface
which would be trickier to get working.