I just pulled out three random photos and ran them through to be sure I was describing it right. They're two old photos of me, and one of my daughter at age three. Now that I've solved the mystery of the scanner, I need to solve the mystery of the 30 or so extra pounds between then and now. . .
Software is the strength of many scanners, but this Canon one is faster and much quieter than the older one. If you have photos you value and a lot of work to do, prorating the cost of the new scanner amongst all of those photos makes it a reasonable expense, especially when compared to having them professionally scanned.
I will add, though, that if you want to do something important with these photos then you should scan them as tiff (best) or PNG (not quite as large as a tiff) or some other durable file, versus jpg, which are "lossy." And not as a GIF, which is stable, but doesn't use very many colors.