Simple way to organize thousands of phone photos?

Hey Jamie!

I had two phones and a laptop with 40k photos, the easiest fix was to pick one cloud and let it do the work. If your devices are mixed, Google Photos is the least painful because it runs on iOS, Android, and desktop. Install the Google Photos app on both phones, open Settings > Backup, turn it on, choose Original for full quality or Storage saver to save space, and enable face grouping. On the laptop, install Google Drive for desktop, open Preferences > My Computer, add your Pictures folder, and set photos and videos to upload to Google Photos. Google Photos will ignore exact duplicates during upload, but near duplicates can slip through, so I did a one-time pass with a desktop duplicate finder before the first big upload. When backup is complete, use Free up space in the app to clear local copies on the phones without deleting the cloud versions.

Keep albums simple by making only a few per year and per trip, and let search and face groups handle the rest. I name albums like 2024-08 Colorado and only add the 50 keepers, then I star Favorites so they float to the top of Memories. To tame the junk, search in Google Photos for type:screenshot or for the word receipts, select all, and Archive so they are out of the main feed but still searchable. If you are mostly in the Apple world, the same idea works with iCloud Photos, and the Duplicates album in iOS 16 or later on iPhone and in macOS Photos makes it easy to merge true duplicates.

Chaos wrangler here: I flipped on Google Photos backup for both phones and use the desktop uploader on the laptop. While the nuggets reheat, I favorite a few keepers and delete screenshots. Once a month I run the built-in duplicate cleanup and it merges copies, then I toss favorites into a simple Highlights 2025 album. Search carries the rest so I quit micromanaging and my blood pressure thanks me.

Refuse subscriptions, so I run Syncthing on both phones and the laptop to auto dump DCIM into a Photos/YYYY/MM folder on a hard drive. De-duplicate with Czkawka or dupeGuru, then tag or album by dropping selects into simple folders. If you want pretty without cloud bills, Immich on a cheap mini PC works and does faces offline.

Oh man and with toddlers running around and work emails piling up, my photo mess was a nightmare until I switched to Google Photos. It auto-backs up everything from my phones and laptop, spots duplicates like a hawk, and lets me make albums without much fuss. Plus, it's free for basics, which is a lifesaver when you're already stretched thin.

Use Google Photos if you must, but I just plug everything into my old laptop & run a free script to dedupe with dupeGuru. No subscriptions eating my wallet. Sort into folders manually. it's simple and costs nothing.