Best way to organize thousands of phone photos

Pick one app to be your home base and let the other be a safety net. If you choose Apple Photos, on iPhone go to Settings > Photos, turn on iCloud Photos and Optimize iPhone Storage, then in Google Photos tap your profile > Photos settings > Backup and turn Back up off to stop double uploads.

If you choose Google Photos, do the reverse and turn off iCloud Photos so you are not managing two masters. On a Mac or PC keep a full resolution copy by downloading everything to one machine. on a Mac open Photos > Settings > iCloud and choose Download Originals to this Mac, then back that machine up with Time Machine to an external drive and a second cloud backup. Do one 20 minute session on the first weekend of each month and ignore it the rest of the time. Start with quick wins in Albums > Media Types like Screenshots, Screen Recordings, and Bursts. In a burst tap Select and Keep Only 1, then delete the rest.

Then open Recents for last month and make one pass only. Tap Favorite on keepers, delete obvious junk, and move receipts or manuals to Archive in Google Photos or to the Hidden album in Apple Photos so they stop cluttering memories. Use built in cleanup tools. In Apple Photos go to Albums > Utilities > Duplicates and Merge, and in Google Photos open Library > Utilities and use the storage tools to review duplicates and blurry photos. Keep tagging minimal so it sticks and lean on what the apps already do like People, Places, dates, and search. Make a few evergreen albums such as Family, Travel, House, and Work, and add only your Favorites to them so they self curate. If you have a Mac, batch add simple keywords a few times a year by selecting photos, pressing Command I, and typing a keyword like 2024 Travel, then make Smart Albums that auto gather those. If you ever want an exit plan, export by year with File > Export > Export Unmodified Originals and choose subfolders by year or month, and keep that export on the same external drive as your backup.

Pulled everything down once with Google Takeout and iCloud, deduped with dupeGuru, then renamed to 2024-08-28_1234 and filed into YYYY/MM using XnView MP. Tag and rate in digiKam so it writes to the files, then Syncthing mirrors to a cheap USB SSD and an old mini PC for backup. Zero subscriptions, just a Sunday setup and a monthly 15 minute cull where 1 star means trash. It went from chaos to stupid simple calendar folders.

Pick one primary, not both. Set a 10 minute weekly alarm, open Google Photos, tap Utilities, Review suggestions, and nuke screenshots and duplicates. Heart the keepers, delete the rest, then hit Free up space to clear device copies. Turn off auto save from Messages and WhatsApp to stop the flood.

idk, this worked for me. I picked iCloud only and turned off Google backup to stop the double mess. Once a month I search This Month, favorite the keepers, delete the rest. Time Machine to a cheap external gives me the backup because cloud hiccups burned me once, and yeah the taps are annoying but it stays under control.

Thought I was curating art and ended up backing up 600 blurry menu pics and a whole series of my left shoe. The only thing that saved me was making a dumb rule called Five Per Event, everything else gets binned without mercy. Also killed auto save from every chat app and used the Screenshots filter to mass delete that nonsense. Still salty at how many storage nags I get, but this stuck.