My parents have thousands of old pictures and slides and their quality is only going to get worse as time goes on. Anyone here have any recommendations for the best way to make digital copies?

I've never really used a good color scanner, but I assume there are good options for scanning photos out there. Anything special for copying the old slides?

Many of the better scanners these days will scan multiple pictures/slides per pass and put them into their own files automatically. This is what I have done in the past. I still have well over a thousand left to do so it's a multi-year project for me. After I get digital copies then I store one copy on a large external hard drive and burn two DVD copies of everything (for family pictures) I also print many on archival quality paper through one of the big online professional photo printers.
 

My grandpa was a serious amatuer photographer way back in the day (I am too) and he left me his entire collection of Kodachrome 64 slide film that was shot between the 40's to 70's. It was over 5000 slides. I shot slide film too up until about year 2000.  I use an old Minolta slide scanner and it works great. You could probably pick one up for under $100.  I use a decent Epson flatbed for photos (he never used print film, but I did) and they can be had cheap too.  It's time consuming, but well worth it IMO.

Prepare for the agony. I've scanned about 1600 old family photos myself. Didn't have any slides to worry about.

There are programs that will scan and separate groups of images, but the problem there is that you may get far better results if you do gamma-adjustments during scanning for each individual picture. You especially get this problem scanning old color photos (the red levels go crazy) and simply scanning all the photos at the default gamma and then trying to do color/gamma adjustments after the fact does not produce the same results.

I have a Canoscan LIDE 50, a cheapo $70 LED-light scanner a few years ago, that works great––if you adjust the gamma for every photo during scanning.

The one thing I dislike about it is that it is poor for scanning newsprint and magazine stuff, because it doesn't have a real "de-screen" function. For best results you need to be able to choose the LPI of the de-screen function while scanning.
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The Photograph to Digital Picture Converter
The Slide and Negative to Digital Picture Converter

I found these in the Hammacher Schlemmer Catalog and might be what you need.

OST

Another project that I need to complete..