Best way to organize thousands of phone photos so I can actually find things

Hi Katherine. pick one app to be your organizing home and stick to it and even if both are backing up. If you like powerful search and archiving, use Google Photos as home. If you live on Apple devices and want built‑in duplicate merging, use Apple Photos as home. Do a one‑time cleanup there: on iPhone go to Photos > Albums > Utilities > Duplicates and merge, then clear Albums > Screenshots and Bursts. In Google Photos go to Library > Utilities, run the clean up suggestions or manage storage to remove blurry shots and big junk, then move receipts and reference pics to Archive so they vanish from the main feed but stay searchable. Turn on face grouping and name people so search becomes magic.

Create just a few evergreen albums you will actually use: Docs and IDs, Receipts, Home and Car, Kids School, Travel YYYY‑MM Place, and Best of YYYY.

For each trip, bulk select by date and location, then Add to album so the whole trip is grouped. For important one‑offs, add a one‑word description like "passport" or "insurance" to the photo so search nails it later. Ongoing habit that sticks: after any photo session, spend two minutes to favorite the keepers, delete the obvious junk, and drop the keepers into the right album, then once a week clear Screenshots and check Utilities or Archive suggestions.

Cross platform means duplicate hell, broken live photos, and face tags that drift. Search is great until you actually need the one form you snapped three phones ago. Export everything to a local drive by year and month, then let the cloud apps be a convenience layer, not the source of truth.

Same mess here until I admitted the clutter was the problem, not the tool. I had 18,000 shots spread across iCloud and Google and none of them sparked anything except anxiety. One weekend I sat down and deleted ruthlessly and and the silence after the purge felt like taking a heavy backpack off. I only kept what I would actually want to see again or show someone without apologizing.

What stuck was stupid simple. Pick one home and move everything there and then turn off auto sync in the other so it stops breeding. Use the built in duplicate cleaner and merge faces, then stop fiddling. Keep one smart bucket for life moments by year, one for documents and receipts, and one shared album for people who need them. Anything worth keeping gets a heart, because Favorites is the only view I actually browse. My habit is five minutes most nights while brushing my teeth, delete the nonsense from today and favorite the one keeper. That tiny routine keeps the whole thing from swelling again.

I live in both ecosystems because of kids photos from school and family. The only way it works is to choose a primary service and disable camera uploads on the other. Do one cleanup pass with duplicate merge and the auto suggestions & then make a single shared album for each kid plus a yearly album for everything else. After that, I delete in the moment and I favorite the one or two shots that tell the story. During pickups I skim the last week and clear bursts, screenshots, and homework junk. It is boring, but it is fast and it sticks.

Pick one platform, auto-delete dupes, and star keepers daily.