Nearly every household we visit has the same problem: a vast, unsorted photo library that is too intimidating to start on. The instinct is to sort chronologically from the beginning, which guarantees you will abandon it around 2014.
Work in this order instead. It front-loads all the benefit.
Step one: gather everything first
Before organising anything, get every photo into one place. Most families have photos on two phones, an old laptop, a memory card, an external drive and two cloud accounts. Organising one of six locations feels like failure because it is.
Step two: delete the obvious rubbish
- Screenshots. Most people have thousands and want none of them.
- Burst duplicates — eleven near-identical shots where one will do.
- Photos of documents, receipts and parking bays.
- Genuinely blurred or black frames.
Step three: let the software do the sorting
Modern photo apps already sort by date and location automatically. The one manual step genuinely worth doing is naming faces — once you have tagged the ten people who matter most, searching "Mum 2019" becomes instant, and that single action replaces most album-building.
Step four: albums only for things you will look for
Do not build albums for every month. Build them for holidays, weddings, milestones — the things you actually go looking for. Ten good albums beat two hundred empty ones, and you will maintain ten.
Step five: protect it, then keep it tidy
Once organised, back it up properly with version history so this work is never repeated. Then adopt one habit: spend two minutes a month deleting the week’s screenshots and duplicates. That single habit is what prevents the return to chaos.