Digital organization help, I’m hoping someone in this group has a solution because I’m completely stuck.
I currently have 52,000+ photos that I’m trying to organize into categories. My goal is to sort everything into specific groups, but the process has become incredibly overwhelming. So far I have tried: • Using Apple Notes and creating separate folders/notes…
I currently have 52,000+ photos that I’m trying to organize into categories. My goal is to sort everything into specific groups, but the process has become incredibly overwhelming. So far I have tried: • Using Apple Notes and creating separate folders/notes for each category. This works, but I have to manually select and add photos one by one, which is extremely time-consuming. • Using the iPhone search/AI features to find similar photos in batches. Unfortunately, it doesn’t recognize enough of my photos accurately enough to make a meaningful dent in the project. • Hiding all 52,000 photos and then unhiding them in batches of 1,000 while sorting. This is the method I’m currently using, but I’m lucky if I can get through 1,000 photos in an entire day. • Google Photos and several other organizing apps. Google Photos has been the closest thing to helpful, but it’s still very tedious and frustrating for the amount of photos I have & it blends the photos I’m trying to organize with my own personal photos which is the opposite of helpful. At this point I’m wondering if I’m missing a better system entirely. Has anyone successfully organized a photo library this large? Are there any apps, workflows, AI tools, automation tricks, or methods that helped you sort tens of thousands of photos without manually touching every single one? I’m open to any suggestions because I feel like I’ve hit a wall. Thank you!
Collected discussion
I’d stop trying to sort inside your main photo library. Export a copy into a clean folder, make 8–10 broad buckets first, then use search/AI only to batch-move obvious groups instead of touching every photo.
Is this work-related? Unless it's work-related (has a pretty good chance of generating income down the line), I wouldn't bother.
thats a massive library to organize . I'd start with simple categories first and slowly clean it up over time instead of trying to do it all at once.
The mistake I’ve made with big photo cleanup projects is trying to name the perfect category while looking at each photo. That makes every photo a decision. It’s much easier to do fast passes: obvious keep/delete first, then broad groups, then only detailed sorting for the photos that actually survived.
I've found digikam great for manually organising my photos. It has tagging, folders, it has map view, timeline view. It can certainly handle many thousands of photos. I haven't used it's AI features. I can't check my library size at the moment but the internet says digikam can handle 20k-400k photos and I'd believe it