This may be a bit off point but I'm going to post this anyway since I feel it bears some relevance to archiving photos.
I recently used Home Movie Depot to transfer old Hi-8 videotapes to a digital format that I can use to edit and archive along with my photos.
The online process was pretty simple: you choose the services you wish to purchase (in my case a straightforward video-digital transfer), make your payment and then ship the tapes off. That's it. They return the original media with the DVDs.
The turnaround time was impressive: in less than two weeks I had my original tapes and the new DVDs. Unfortunately, I discovered that half of the movies suffered from out-of-synch video and sound. I attempted to contact Home Movie Depot and it took a week before I could get through to someone in customer support.
The woman I spoke with was honest with me: they had a problem with "a setting" used during the transfer process of numerous movies and if I would send back the discs and the tapes they would redo everything.
Which they did. And mailed the original tapes and discs back to me soon afterwards.
I have also used ScanCafe as a test run form work. The idea was to see how well they handled the transfer of a series of different formats, but particularly slides. I also included medium-format negatives and prints as well.
Straight off I should warn you it took more than 3 months to transfer less than a hundred items. And they outsource to Bangalore. And their customer service was often unresponsive and certainly difficult to track down.
I would say that you should use ScanCafe at your own risk.
