Maybe not the right price for a gift, but I just bought the EPSON FastFoto FF-640 (its around $600), and was able to scan ~3000 photos in 2 days with good quality.
I am very happy with the results. It is really fast and scans at good quality. It can scan both sides to get notes that are on the photo, but I found it only detected comments at a very low rate. It also doesn't do well with any tape on photos or thicker stock. I couldn't scan Polaroids or older photos that were on card stock. The feed takes something like 30-50 at a time.
So far I've only scanned documents with this thing but it kicks ass. Scanned about 2000 documents front and back in a few hours and most of that time was removing staples.
https://www.amazon.com/Epson-FastFoto-FF-640-High-Speed-Scanning/dp/B01HR89FNK
Scans both sides simultaneously and ridiculously fast. Only downside is that it only does 600dpi. But I think generally 1200dpi scans of old photos don't look particularly amazing anyway.