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Physical mail generally isn't under surveillance past occasional package inspection (e.g. an X-ray of a suspicious package), and the rare targeted government surveillance operation on an individual or group, at least for the contents of mail.
The U.S Postal Inspection Service has a number of data sources they do collect from, though. If you make a USPS account, for example, then they can get info like your credit card number and IP address. If your package has a tracking number assigned, they can tell where exactly your mail is in transit. And if your address and the sender's address is on your mail, then they will of course know who sent you which piece of mail when. Pretty standard stuff.
In terms of actually inspecting what's inside people's mail, that's very difficult, because mail isn't standardized. Some envelopes will have one small sheet of paper. Some will have a larger folded one. That might be folded into 2 pieces or 4. It might be 3 sheets of paper. Maybe it has a smaller paper card inside as well. You get the idea.
Whereas internet traffic is based on actual standards, and so if they want to know the contents of the data in an HTTP request, for example, they know exactly which parts of the packets to look at, every single time.
It would make surveillance more difficult, for sure, because individually opening, scanning, and putting back any possible variant of mail in envelopes is very time consuming and difficult, but it would do absolutely nothing to stop targeted surveillance of given individuals, and would also make individual associations more apparent.
To give another example, the government doesn't know which people are communicating with which other people if you use Signal, because not even Signal knows, so not even a court order could allow them to find out. If you were sending mail between all those people, the government now has a list of every single time you sent a letter, and to whom.
Using that same example, with Signal, the contents of your message is encrypted. With mail, it's in plaintext. Anybody could read that. If they intercept the data from your Signal chats, they get encrypted nonsense. If they intercept your mail, they get your entire conversation.
The smart decision is to use tools that preserve privacy and anonymity, making surveillance near impossible, rather than a system like mail, which just makes surveillance annoying and time-consuming.
pictures are taken by sorting machines of every piece of mail that goes through usps. that data is retained by the usps for a period of time, and is open to 'law enforcement' on request; and who knows what really happens to that data when the usps doesn't want to hold it any longer.
The photos taken by the sorting machines are of the outside of the envelope, and are necessary in order to perform OCR of the destination address and to verify postage. There is no general mechanism to photograph the contents of mailpieces, and given how enormous the operations of the postal service is, casting a wide surveillance net to capture the contents of mailpieces is simply impractical before someone eventually spilled the beans.
That said, what you describe is a method of investigation known as mail cover, where the useful info from the outside of a recipient's mail can be useful. For example, getting lots of mail from a huge number domestic addresses in plain envelopes, the sort that victims of remittance fraud would have on hand, could be a sign that the recipient is laundering fraudulent money. Alternatively, sometimes the envelope used by the sender is so thin that the outside photo accidentally reveals the contents. This is no different than holding up an envelope to the sunlight and looking through it. Obvious data is obvious to observe.
In electronic surveillance (a la NSA), looking at just the outside of an envelope is akin to recording only the metadata of an encrypted messaging app. No, you can't read the messages, but seeing that someone received a 20 MB message could indicate a video, whereas 2 KB might just be one message in a rapid convo.