Lazy Daze Owners' Group

I think your cousin had the right idea. As long as you can provide good, even lighting, a camera is going to be much more useful for your project than a scanner.

Lighting is crucial for this kind of work. You're going to spend a fair amount of time paging through scrapbooks, and you don't want to have to do it all over again because the pictures turn out distorted or with odd color casts. I recommend against trying to use table lamps or light from a nearby window. Good lighting doesn't have to be expensive; you can make do with a light bar made from 2x4s and a couple of clamp-on brooder lamp-type reflector shades.

You'll want at least two lights placed a few feet from the subject, aimed at a 45° angle to minimize reflections. Daylight-balanced LED or compact fluorescent bulbs will do, and they needn't be super-powerful--100 watt equivalent bulbs should work. Above all, don't mix light sources with different color balances--for example, a table lamp (yellowish) and window light (bluish). You can correct a single color cast in software, but mixed-colored lighting is almost impossible to fix, even for an expert.

Awhile ago a friend of mine and I put together a website that explains the basics of photographing textile art. Most of what's there is applicable to photographing scrapbooks; you just have to scale it down. :-) The site is called "Shoot That Quilt!". Pay special attention to the "Gallery of Wrongs," which shows examples of what not to do.

If you have good lighting, almost any modern digital camera in the $150-and-up range will do a good job for your purposes. If you get one that has manual as well as automatic controls, so much the better. If I were doing this job, I'd use my iPhone--most smartphones nowadays have good cameras, and the iPhones are up there with the best. I have several digital cameras, but I do most of my day-to-day shooting with a two-year-old iPhone 7 Plus. But since you don't have a smartphone, you get to shop for a point-and-shoot camera. Canon, Nikon, and Panasonic, among others, all make very good small cameras. I'm partial to Panasonic's ZS-50, which packs a lot of features (including a 30x Leica zoom lens) into a very compact package, but a less expensive camera would also work.

When shooting, use the camera's highest quality and resolution settings. A 64 GB flash card will hold thousands of photos, and you'll transfer them to your MacBook and reuse the card ad infinitum. As Kent said, be sure those files get backed up! I'd buy a couple of cards--that's all you're likely to need. A spare battery is a must; I've found that Wasabi brand batteries and chargers work as well as the camera-makers' much more expensive ones. Bonus: most Wasabi chargers can run on either 120 VAC or 12 VDC, making them ideal for us RVers.

The most important thing is to get the lighting right. Do that, and any decent camera or smartphone can turn out good images of those scrapbook pages.

I'm looking for thoughts about a camera because I've got a project I want to get done, plus to just take photos on occasion (I don't have a cellphone, much less a smart one with a camera,
I'm leaning towards a nice  (generally idiot-proof) "point & shoot."