So... I bought a laptop with something like a 120GB HD... So I have stuff on several external hard drives, zip drives and SD cards... I can't really find anything...
But if I am looking for photos I go to search (or find) and type in .jpg Or .tif if I am looking for a tiff file... etc. I know very little about non-mac pc's etc. but that's how I find stuff. It takes a while and I seem to have 3 or 4 of everything.
I have scanned in old photos. Its very time consuming. I also scanned in slides. We did a 150 picture slide show with a portable projector at a family reunion of sorts. It was a lot of work but most people seemed to enjoy it.