I have tons of old photos (the printed kind) from the 50s up through the 2000s. Not many have been scanned for digitization. For the photos that I have already scanned or downloaded from family postings on Facebook, I would like an easy-to-use photo editor to clean up, repair, sharpen, etc. I have never done much in this area other than simple edits in MS Paint or MS Photos to crop, resize, etc. It seems like most of the photo editing software I've run across so far is designed to emulate Photoshop of which I know nothing. There are tutorials but it seems like it will be pretty time-consuming to get up to speed even using those. I don't care much about special effects, background removal, etc. I'm primarily interested in restoring/freshening up some old photo prints. And maybe work on some that were taken later with digital cameras or smartphones.

IIRC, the scanner that we have auto-corrects as photos (physical ones) are scanned, resulting in 2 digital files (original, enhanced).

It also has a photo feeder and scans about one per 30 seconds (my recollection). When I get home I'll find that brand & model if you're interested.

'Darktable' is probably the most feature packed free alternative to Lightroom. If I am reading into your post correctly a one click 'auto' button is really what you are looking for even over cost.

A lot of software 'auto' setting can do a good job; however, everything is relative, and I may be a bit over critical here about how good of a job 'auto' will do (for any software scanning old photos).

If you are in the College Station area, I could give you a little Lightroom tutorial. While it is a subscription; if you have everything downloaded and organized you could buzz through your editing in a month or two just doing a little at a time. We could even colorize some of those old photos.

If you have some time, the free trial is seven days, and you could really buckle down and edit away. A time saving feature of Lightroom and probably most paid for software is being able to batch edit; and that alone could be worth a subscription for a month. For example, once you get your editing recipe for your 1950's photos dialed in you can apply that recipe to all those photos as a group versus editing one by one.

I can definitely see where you are coming from. The great thing about moder software is that it can do just about everything. The bad thing is that it can do just about everything. You are just looking for a few tools.

Again, if you are in the area, bring a few different scanned photos and we can go over some of the basics so that you will be both comfortable and efficient in your editing. You can at least make a go/no-go on Lightroom.

I am on Lake Livingston, so not immediately in the B-CS area. If there's an app with an Easy button to clean up/restore old photos I'm all in. If not, I'm looking for something that has a minimal learning curve.

Off the top of my head, I cant think of anything one click auto.

If you have a few special photos that need some work scan them at the highest settings and save in the .tiff file format. Then let me know and I will send you a Google Drive folder link to put them into. I am not going to promise any miracles. However, I have had some good luck with photoshop getting rid of creases, minor rips and pinholes.

Thanks for the offer. We have albums and bins packed with photo prints. I haven't gone through them to see how many I would want to scan. I am fairly sure there will be more than a few that need some work.

I don't really want to sign up for any type of subscription as there could be relatively long periods where I don't have much time to work on what will likely be a fairly long term project. I wouldn't be opposed to a onetime payment for software that can achieve what I want without a steep learning curve to get reasonably proficient using it.

I have seen some online services that claim to have more or less one touch restoration using AI. But they require a subscription for that functionality.