How do you keep your photo library organized across phone and laptop?

Hi Leah. Pick a single cloud to be the source of truth and turn on auto backup everywhere. If you are in the Apple world and enable iCloud Photos on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. On iPhone go to Settings > your name > iCloud > Photos and enable Sync this iPhone, and on Mac open Photos > Settings > iCloud and turn on iCloud Photos. If you are mixed platform, use Google Photos and in the mobile app open your profile photo > Photos settings > Backup and turn on Backup. On Android toggle only Camera in Backup device folders to keep screenshots out and stop manual AirDrop or USB imports once sync is running.

Do the initial dedupe after everything finishes syncing. Apple Photos shows a Duplicates album that lets you merge exact copies, and Google Photos has Library > Utilities with Duplicates suggestions, though it may not appear for every account. For tagging, enable face grouping in settings, then name people in the People album and merge lookalikes. for places, keep camera location on and batch add a missing location on Mac by selecting a set, pressing Command I, and entering a city once. Tame screenshots by creating a Smart Album on Mac with Media type is Screenshot and Date added is in the last 30 days, then delete that set monthly. on Android just turn off Backup for the Screenshots folder. Backups should be automated, so if you use iCloud choose Download Originals to this Mac and let Time Machine back up the Photos library to an external drive, and if you use Google Photos schedule a Takeout export every two months and copy the zips to a drive.

One home base solves it. After the last soccer tournament flooded my camera roll, I picked iCloud Photos and turned on auto-upload across phone, laptop, and tablet so everything lands in the same spot. Ran a one-time dupe cleanup on the laptop with dupeGuru, let People and Places tag most of it, and kept a few simple albums for trips. I do a 5 minute Friday cleanup for screenshots and a monthly external drive backup so I can forget about it the rest of the time.

Hot take, let your school's free OneDrive be the mothership. Turn on camera upload in the mobile app, sync that Photos folder on the laptop, run dupeGuru once to vaporize clones, and let Microsoft Photos handle People and Places tagging. I dump screenshots into a separate folder with an auto rule so I can purge them when the ramen timer dings. Backup is OneDrive plus a cheap USB drive I plug in monthly and move on.

With all the kids' birthday pics and school events piling up and I've found Google Photos to be a total game-changer for keeping everything synced across my phone and laptop. It automatically backs up, dedupes those duplicate sunsets you mentioned, and even suggests tags for people and places so I don't have to spend precious family time on it. Set it up once with auto-upload on, and you'll be smiling every time you open your library without the chaos.

Use Google Photos for cross-device sync and automatic deduplication. Enable face and location tagging features. Set up cloud backup to avoid manual weekends.

Dude, as someone scraping by on ramen, I swear by free tools like Google Photos for syncing and deduping across my beat-up laptop and phone without shelling out for fancy software. Throw in some manual tagging for friends and spots during downtime, and boom, no more triplicate memes cluttering your life. It's like herding cats, but way funnier when it works.