I just spent an entire Sunday organizing 10 years of photos and it was weirdly therapeutic

Did this last weekend Split everything by year then trip, used Google Photos for face-grouping and a duplicate finder to delete like 5k blurred shots So satisfying Ended up backing the cleaned library to a 2TB drive and the cloud (dont trust teh cloud alone), renamed the important ones with short searchable names so i can find Bali in 10 seconds instead of scrolling for ages and it honestly felt like photo archaeology and was definately worth the 5 hours even tho my back hated me im no expert but if you want the tiny script i used to bulk-rename and timestamp files i can drop it here

I'm so glad you took the time for yourself; imagining you doing that has been a comfort to me.

I have 25k photos just from the past 3 years...

Still got this task looming above me. And it doesn't help that there are overlapping file names and inconsistent time stamps between the different devices used ... How did you deal with these issues, are there some supporting tips and/or tools you'd recommend?

Congratulations!!! I did the same thing a few years ago when Google photos changed their policy on how they'd save/store. It made me go from less than 10% use to almost maxed. I went through and finally downloaded all the zip files one month at a time, organized them (pics vs video and by month), checked for doubles, merged my photos with my husband's photos, and stored them on 2 different external hard drives before deleting out of Google. It's been my once-a-year task. Now, to actually put together and order those memory books I keep saying I'd do like 10 years ago...

i did this a couple months ago. found photos of my mom from before she got sick that i completely forgot existed. cried for a bit then organized them into a folder. weirdly healing

I’ve got my mums old photos in my loft, they need sitting out according to her, by me, but I don’t know who half of them are or where they were taken lol I’m putting it off and have been for a couple of years 

Did you use Google photos or some other photo manager? Well done, it's a formidable task!

It only took 5 hours? Yay you!!

Scanned all my old 35mm photos and put them in the cloud and recycled the physical copies. Felt good.

So jealous that you have done this! What a legend

Wheneveri work on decades of photos, I have crazy dreams at night. People showing up in the wrong place or timeline of my life.