About 7-8 years ago I started organizing our family's digital photos onto an external hard drive. These photos came from a variety of cameras (point and shoot, DSLR, and smart phones). Our first smart phones were iPhones with very little storage, so we were constantly having to clear the photos off the phone in order to create more space, which is why I started this project. I also realized I had a huge number of photos from my college years and early married life that could be lost in an instant should something happen to them (I had never done any kind of data back up).

We didn't get any kind of cloud storage set up until we changed from an iPhone to Google Pixel (around 2017 sometime). Well, with the automatic photo storage thorough Google, the organization project with the external hard drive came to a halt essentially.

We also have much of the external hard drive photos uploaded to a NAS that is at my in-laws house. Although I'm not 100% sure if it is even working anymore. I do know it is old enough that it isn't getting any security updates anymore. It's probably 7-8 years old as I'm pretty sure it was bought as part of this project (in-laws decided they should organize their digital photos too). We got it so we would have an off-site backup for the photos.

Here's my issue - I have no idea how to best proceed in order to continue to organize these photos and have easier access to them. A couple of things I'm wanting to accomplish with this project.

1) Safety - I want to keep these photos safe from losing them. We got the NAS originally to protect from hard drive failure. The hard drive is now 13 years old and essentially only has photos on it.
2) Accessibility - I'd really like to be able to easily access them to look through with our family. Currently we have to hook the external hard drive up to our TV or computer if we want to look at them with our kids.
3) Consolidation - It's quite annoying to have part of the photos on external HD/NAS and the other portion of them only stored through Google
4) Automation/Semi-automation - I really don't have time anymore to dedicate hours to photo organization. When this project started, I had much more free time than I do now and as life got busier, sitting down at the computer to download photos became too cumbersome.

A couple of other things to add - we already pay for 200GB of storage through Google. And I'm willing to spend at least some money for this project, but really don't want to break the bank to do it.

TLDR - organizing photos sucks and I need to safely consolidate and automate photo organization.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated!

I second C@LAg advise. Solid almost a fail proof method to keep the photos.

So do you put your photos onto 2 separate hard drives and keep one off site?

It sounds like what I was doing is very similar to what you do, so I guess that's good for preventing failure. I guess I'll just need to be better/more efficient with keeping up with it.

When you say "scratch disc", is that just an external drive or folder on your computer that you can easily download pics to and organize? That's a really good idea that I hadn't thought of doing. Do you follow this same process for photos from your phone camera as well?

Thanks a bunch for the detailed reply.