Please help me sort out my photos

[Wombatstew]

I have thousands of digital photos taken over the last 20 years, some are in CD, some on external hard drives and some in google photos. They are all in such a mess!

I tried to tackle this a few years ago (left unfinished) and possibly have some of CD photos downloaded on the hard drives but not all of them and so there would be double ups of some of the photos. Also I notice some of the digital camera photos have the same numbers but are different photos. I don’t want to accidentally delete any and I would also like to keep the photo resolution as per the original not compressed or anything (hope the last bit makes sense as I am not very technical)

I need a way of downloading/ uploading all photos onto ‘something’ which will sort out any doubles and from there I can organise into date and then back up on a hard drive. Thus giving me a copy in the cloud and on a hard drive of only one of each photo.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated please.

I bought an external hard drive that plugs into my computer. Set up loads of files by year and month and just started doing a bit every month/few months. I've been working on it for a couple of years now and it is definitely much easier to organise now.

There are programmes that will search your photos and identify any doubles. They will give you the choice to keep or delete any "double".

Have a Google.