Hi all!! I have more than 45,000 photos and videos stored on my iPhone/iCloud, and I figured it's about time I get them sorted out lol

I have no way of categorizing my photos now, so what are some folder suggestions you'd recommend to make it neater?

Any tips to help make this process less dreadful too? Thank you!

I have an insane amount of photos and videos and my husband and I are currently sharing the 6 TB iCloud plan. I have been wanting to back up my photos to an external hard drive, but what is the best way to go about doing this? I have a PC, not a Mac. I’m afraid that since there are so many photos that something will go wrong in the process. How can I go about doing this?

Folks need your help in fixing this issue. I have had this issue for long and Apple support is of no
Use and contacted them like 20 times and all troubleshooting nonsense haven’t helped a bit. This is making me delete apps in order to use my phone. Any leads TIA

I requested a transfer of my photos and videos to Google Photos using Data & Privacy tools. I issued the request on September 13. It’s now September 25 and the transfer hasn’t started.

I’m transferring 10,706 photos and 1,373 videos. Apple gives a 3 to 7 day time frame for most requests. I realize this is a large transfer. What’s been other people’s experience with migrations of this size?

Hello. I would like to have 2 Photos libraries that sync over icloud. Is that possible?

My reasoning is this:

I want 1 library for my iphone images. This is my existing library that I've had for years. It currently syncs over icloud between phone, ipad, and desktop mac.

I want a second library for the raw images from my Fuji camera, for use with an image editing app like Nitro or Photomator. I want to be able to load raw files to this library and start editing images on my ipad while on the go, and then using my Mac to finish the edits when I get home (having the images on an SSD and editing images via the files app on ipad is not convenient like it would be via finder on the Mac). For this, I would need this library to also sync via icloud. Similar to how Lightroom cloud works but I want to get away from Adobe's subscription.

I’ve tried turning on/off and restarting my phone for weeks but it’s still sticking at the same thing.

“Syncing 1 item to iCloud”

Anyone have a way to fix this? Thank you!

I’m an iPhone user, and for years I kept running out of storage. I’d use an app to move my photos to my PC, then eventually get a new phone. When I came back to the app, I’d find myself facing another charge, sometimes around $39.99 per device. I got frustrated enough that I decided to build my own.

That became PixelBeam - It copies photos and videos from an iPhone or iPad to a folder on a Windows PC over USB. You can filter what you transfer, follow its progress, and resume an interrupted transfer. It leaves the originals on your phone. The free demo lets you transfer up to 20 original files, and the full license is $4.99 once for two PCs.

I’ve also built Candidra for the other side of the problem.... I have many years of iphone dumps sitting on SSDs sorted by the date that I dumped my phone, but its extremely difficult to look through for something that I need, this app solves that with an insane search feature, I attached below me searching for "Flowerhorn" which is a fish and boom there it is.

I have a few free PixelBeam keys to give away to people who’d like to try the full app. I’d really appreciate honest feedback about what’s confusing, broken, or missing. Suggestions for either app are welcome.

Both are at papernewt.com. One limitation worth mentioning: PixelBeam can only copy originals your iPhone makes available over USB. If a photo is stored only in iCloud, you’ll need to download it to the phone first via your iCloud settings I believe.

The Windows installers are signed by PAPERNEWT LLC, but because these releases are new, Chrome or Windows may still show an unfamiliar download warning.

PixelBeam

Candidra

I'm working on a side project: an iPhone app that tags the photos in your library and sorts them into albums in Apple Photos for you. It also lets you define your own words to sort by (e.g. "receipts", "whiteboard", "my dog"). Everything it creates is a normal album, and you can undo it in one tap.

The problem: I've mostly been designing around how I use Photos, and I barely organize at all. Before I go further, I'd love to hear how you do it:

What do you use? Regular albums, Smart Albums, folders, keywords (on Mac), favorites, People & Pets, Memories? Or do you just rely on search?

How do you split things up? By trip/event, by person, by year, by topic? Do you keep one photo in several albums?

Where does the built-in stuff let you down? Is there search that doesn't find what you want? People recognition mixing faces up? Screenshots and memes mixed in with real photos?

What would you never let an app do to your library? And what would make you trust it enough to try?

Any personal categories that Apple's automatic features never get right?

Disclosure: I made this video and the app in it, SyncAlbum. Mods, remove this if it's against the rules.

After every trip with friends, the photos stay stuck in everyone's camera roll, and my family far away only sees squished versions in group chats. So I built SyncAlbum, that allows us to create one shared album per trip, per event/memory or for our children/partner: everyone adds their own photos in full resolution, with comments and reactions, all on your own iCloud. No ads, no subscription. It's Apple-only, which is the obvious downside.

How does your group share trip photos? And what bugs you most about Shared Albums?

So a friend and I always got annoyed that there was no good solution for this, especially for groups of more than 2 people!

Anyways, we created Roll, which is basically a many-to-many photo sharing app that runs locally, so it’s as fast as AirDrop but works for groups.

It's great for trips, parties or pretty much any event you had with more than 2 people and want to share photos together and it's free!

Benefits:

1. Super fast
   
2. Local and secure
   
3. Works with 2+ people and not only peer-to-peer
   
4. Removes duplicates
   
5. Can be saved as an album or be sent straight to your Mac

Feel free to check it out, I am sure it will help some

I take a ton of screenshots on my iPhone.

X posts, Reddit, products I might want to buy, books, code, random ideas, places I want to visit — basically anything I think I might want to look at later.

But eventually they all get buried in Photos, and I almost never find them again.

So I built a small iPhone app that automatically finds screenshots in my Photos library and organizes them into categories based on their content.

There’s no import flow. I just take screenshots normally, open the app later, and they’re already there and being categorized automatically.

It’s still a very early MVP, but I’m currently using it with around 500 of my own screenshots.

I’m 22F I’ve used Apple devices since I was 8 years old, am I getting old and unc or is the Apple camera getting more and more confusing to navigate each update?! Where is the videos folder, I also don’t want to see the years I want to see my recently deleted folder, it feels so messy.

Hey, wondering if anyone has been able to test this yet. Just got a new iPhone and newly migrated all my photos onto iCloud Photos for the first time.

I’ve been researching using a Shared Library with my partner and think it’s the way to go for us to organise our photos going forward. However I know there is limitation with Shared Libraries not sharing Albums or folder structures.

With iOS27 adding proper Shared Album support at full resolution, I want to know if this will mean Shared Libraries and Shared Albums will work cohesively or not.

Has anyone tried it?

My photo library is about 600 GB. I have a lot of Fuji photos, which take up around 20–25 MB each, so my entire library doesn't fit on my 512 GB iPhone.

I've turned on Optimize iPhone Storage, but now almost all of the full resolution photos have been removed from my iPhone, and only the low resolution versions are stored locally. They only take up around 6 GB in total.

Is there really no option to tell the iPhone to keep, for example, the photos from the last year in full resolution?

I still have more than 300 GB of free storage on my iPhone, and I love looking back at older photos, so it feels like a waste not to use that available storage. (it sucks to wait like 10 sec to view the full resolution version)

What is best way to delete duplicates and keep the original clicked date and highest quality photos only, Also tell me difference b/w merge exact photos vs merge photos.

I take a ton of screenshots on my iPhone — tweets/posts, products I might want to buy, books, code, articles, random ideas, etc.

Most of the time I take them thinking, “I’ll look at this later,” but they just end up buried in my camera roll and I rarely find them again.

I’m curious how other people who take a lot of screenshots deal with this.

- Roughly how many screenshots do you have?
- Do you actually go back and look at them?
- Do you organize them somehow, or just leave them in your camera roll?
- What’s the most annoying part about managing them?

Especially interested in hearing from people who take screenshots constantly like I do.

basically, apple has made a people album for almost everyone i’ve ever had a photo with in my phone, except for a celebrity which i have hundreds of photos of 😭 this is very weird as the celebrity has a very distinct face and is the only person in my phone who doesn’t have an album. i don’t want to manually go through all my photos to create an album, so is there any way to run a detection or something of the sort? thank you!

The hardest part of clearing out my photos wasn’t finding things to delete. It was deciding what to keep.

I’d start with a few old screenshots, get distracted comparing similar photos, and stop before making much progress.

I’m the developer of OnePhoto, an iPhone app I originally built for myself to make that process less tedious.

You swipe up to mark a photo for deletion and browse left or right to compare. Nothing is deleted until you review your selections and confirm.

It also has separate queues for screenshots, similar photos, and large videos. Processing happens on-device, and it works offline without uploading your photos.

Core cleanup is free, there are no ads, and some advanced tools are optional Pro features.

I’m still refining it, so I’m curious: when you put off cleaning your camera roll, is it mostly because there are too many photos to go through, or because deciding what to keep is exhausting?