Help with saving and organising photos please

Sunshine_and_Roses

I can't get my head around organising and saving my photos from my phone onto laptop and memory stick.  I know I must be making life very complicated for myself so could do with some help please.
Phone is Samsung Galaxy S9, and all photos saved to 'gallery' as well as Amazon Photos and Google Photos.  I don't know whether I need Amazon and Google as well, but I like that I can access them without having to do anything too technical.  If I want to organise these into albums, I assume I have to do it with each app?
On my laptop (Acer Aspire E15) I have tiles for Photos and Pictures, but cannot work out what the difference is between the two and how I can get photos from phone onto these.  When I plug my phone into the laptop via usb I cannot see where it is located to view, if that makes sense.   This PC-pictures are all old photos which I had on my old phone, but it would be good to add to this.
Hope someone can advise and tell me this is an easy thing to do!!

jsmith9

Plug the phone into you laptop USB and navigate to This PC / Galaxy S9 / Phone / DCIM / Camera. You can drag and drop the photos on your camera to your chosen laptop folder

PS on plugging in, make sure the phone is unlocked and choose 'allow' if prompted

Sunshine_and_Roses

jsmith9 said:

Plug the phone into you laptop USB and navigate to This PC / Galaxy S9 / Phone / DCIM / Camera. You can drag and drop the photos on your camera to your chosen laptop folder

PS on plugging in, make sure the phone is unlocked and choose 'allow' if prompted

That's great, thank you.  Not sure how to make sure the phone is unlocked, but I pressed lots of buttons and a message came up on the laptop screen, I changed from importing files to importing photos and this seemed to work.  Thanks so much for your help.

jsmith9

Phone is unlocked as in either a. enter the pin when you switch on or b. use fingerprints or whatever you do do when you access the phone

googler

Pictures on Samsung phones get filenames which are made up of the date and time the photo was taken. Last night, I took a few, and a typical filename is 

20210109_194642

(9th Jan 2021, 19:46pm and 42 seconds)

If you create folders within your PC photos or pictures folder, with names corresponding to dates and events - for instance;

2020-01-08 Julie's Wedding
2019-10-01 Tom's Anniversary
2018-09-22 Day Trip to Bangor

...then you can easily move the photos corresponding to the day into each folder, and you have them all ordered straight off. 

Sunshine_and_Roses

jsmith9 said:

Phone is unlocked as in either a. enter the pin when you switch on or b. use fingerprints or whatever you do do when you access the phone

I think I was trying to make it too complicated for myself, just like a screen unlock then?

dipsomaniac

Am assuming you are aware if you goto photos.google.com on your laptop browser you can see/access all your Google photos as long as you are logged into you Google account.

I would try and keep things simply.  You don't need both Amazon and Google looking after your photos if you also have a backup on your laptop.  You just need the one cloud storage.  I just have one folder on my pc called 'memories' that is split into two folders 'videos' & 'photos' which are each split into years.  I don't rename anything

wongataa

clareski said:

jsmith9 said:

Phone is unlocked as in either a. enter the pin when you switch on or b. use fingerprints or whatever you do do when you access the phone

I think I was trying to make it too complicated for myself, just like a screen unlock then?

Yes, unlocking the phone just means getting past the screen lock so you can access anything on the phone as you do to make a phone call/use a phone app.

bob_a_builder

"This PC-pictures are all old photos which I had on my old phone, but it would be good to add to this."

You can open up Google Photos on the PC , and drag and drop those photos on to the browser window and they will be added to your google photos collection -- It might appear that they have not uploaded , since they will be arranged in date order, so being older photos will be much further down the list

Don't forget Google Photos will also group photos based on  "People & Pets" , "Places", "Things"  - so  lots of organisation already done for you - These show up under Albums
I find the "People and pets" one the most useful 

For further organisation you can then use the Search function to look for say "Wedding", once it it shows all those pictures select the ones you know are from Wedding 1  Press the + icon to add them to a new Album, do the same again for those from Wedding 2