Name the faces while you still can
If you have inherited boxes of prints, there is a job more urgent than scanning them: labelling them. Sit down with the oldest person in your family, a soft pencil and an hour, and write on the back of each print who is in it, roughly when, and where. Record the conversation on your phone if they will let you, because the stories come out sideways and you will not remember them.
Unnamed photographs of strangers get thrown away by the next generation. Named ones become heirlooms. It is genuinely that simple, and it is the only part of this whole project that has a deadline.
How many photos should I actually keep?
Far fewer than you have, and that is fine. A useful rule is one strong image per event rather than a burst of twelve: pick the sharpest, or the one where people look most like themselves, and let the rest sit unsorted rather than agonising over deletion. If you want a number to aim at, a few hundred genuine Keepers per year of family life is more than most people ever manage to look at again.
What is the safest way to back up family photos?
The principle photographers use is to keep more than one copy, on more than one type of storage, with one copy somewhere other than your house. In practice that usually means your phone's cloud service plus an external drive kept at a relative's home, refreshed once or twice a year. And print the best of them — a paper photograph in a drawer needs no password, no subscription and no charger.
