How Do I Merge Photos From Two Different Phones?
Two cameras, two naming schemes, overlapping numbers. Here is how to combine them without a mess.
The problem is not the merging, it is that both phones used the same filenames. Two cameras that both count from IMG_0001 will collide constantly, and a straight copy either overwrites files or leaves you with IMG_0001 (1) forever.
Sorting by name interleaves two unrelated sequences. Sorting by date only works if both sets carry real capture dates, and the ones that came through chat apps will not.
Renaming by date solves it in one step. Once every file is called 2019-07-14-1105 Paris.jpg, there are no collisions, both phones' photos interleave correctly by time, and the merged folder reads as one library rather than two piles. You can add a per-batch label too, so you can still tell whose camera a photo came from. Duplicates that already exist are skipped rather than copied twice. The first 500 photos are free.