How do you organize digital photos so they don't feel overwhelming

Hey Connor. Pick one hub and stick to it so you are not paying twice and juggling duplicates. For cross‑platform and easy sharing & Google Photos has been the least painful for me. Install Google Photos on both iPhones, tap your profile icon > Photos settings > Backup, turn it on, and set Upload size to Storage saver to stretch your storage. On the web, open Google Photos settings and use Manage storage to compress existing originals to Storage saver and review the suggested deletions for large videos, blurry shots, and duplicates. on the phone, use Free up space after backup completes. For the DSLR and old folders, install Google Drive for desktop, Preferences > Add folder, select your DSLR folder, and check Back up to Google Photos. also enable Upload from SD cards so future imports auto‑upload when you plug in a card. Let the first upload run overnight with the laptop plugged in, and if your internet is slow, set Drive for desktop > Preferences > Settings > Bandwidth to limit upload during the day.

Have one simple local backup so you can delete confidently: a cheap external drive with folders like Photos/2020/2020‑07‑LakeTrip and keep RAWs in Originals/2020/07. Do not over‑organize because date, face, and place search will do the heavy lifting. if capture dates are wrong on a few DSLR files, fix them only for the keepers, not the entire backlog. Set up Partner sharing in Google Photos (Settings > Partner sharing) so your partner automatically gets everything or only specific faces since a date. for example, we auto‑share all photos of our kid and anything since 2018. For grandparents, make one album called Grandparents and turn on Automatically add for selected people so new photos of the kids show up without you doing anything, then share that album link with them. Once you see everything in Google Photos and your external drive backup looks good, stop the double billing by turning off iCloud Photos on the iPhone in Settings > Photos after choosing Download and Keep Originals to avoid unexpected deletions. Expect the cleanup to take a weekend for the initial push, but after that it is hands‑off and you only need to review the Manage storage page every month or so.

Pick one home for everything and shut the others off. Do a one-time consolidation to an external drive and auto-sort into Year/Month folders by capture date, then run a duplicate cleaner to nuke bursts and screenshots. Turn on auto-upload from both phones to that one service only, originals quality on Wi‑Fi, and make a habit of favoriting keepers and deleting the rest at the end of each month. For grandparents, keep a single rolling shared album and drop in a few best shots each month so they actually look at them. Keep one offline backup on a second drive, labeled with the date. Back when we burned CDs we labeled and filed them, so treat the drive the same and print a yearly book of favorites so it feels real.

I turned my chaos into a three-stage flow and it weirdly stuck. Phones auto-upload to one master library, I use Google Photos because my partner is on Android and the grandparents can open shared links, and I disabled iCloud upload to stop duplicates. The DSLR dumps into an Inbox folder that a tiny script moves into YYYY and YYYY-MM folders overnight, then once a week I star the keepers and the stars auto-populate a shared album for family. Once a month I archive everything older than 60 days to an external SSD and keep only the starred albums in the cloud, which keeps costs low but the full library safe on the drive. On a slow laptop, batching at night is everything and I only touch the latest month and the Favorites. It sounds fussy, but I spend 10 minutes on the first Sunday tagging faces and the rest is automatic.

Use Google Photos to auto-backup and delete originals after verifying backups.

Back in the day we'd print photos and stick them in albums or burn them to CDs that gathered dust in a drawer. These days I just dump everything into folders by year and month on my external hard drive. No fancy apps and just sort by date taken and delete duplicates manually when I feel like it. For sharing with grandparents, I use Google Photos' shared albums since it's free and simple. Keeps things cross-platform without much hassle. Don't overthink it. automatic stuff often breaks anyway.

Oh man and organizing photos is my favorite procrastination tactic as a grad student - I've got this epic workflow that'll blow your mind! First, I use Google Photos for automatic backups and AI sorting, it's a game-changer with facial recognition and search that actually works across devices. Then, for the dusty DSLR stuff, I sync everything to Lightroom on my laptop, even if it's slow, and create smart collections based on tags and ratings - so enthusiastic about how it auto-suggests edits too! Share albums with your partner and grandparents via the app, it's seamless and free tier is plenty for most. Seriously, once set up, it feels like magic and you'll never feel overwhelmed again - try it, you'll love it!