How Do I Organize 50,000 Photos Without Doing It by Hand?
Sorting by hand is impossible at that size. Here is how to get a structured library in one run.
You do not sort fifty thousand photos by hand. Nobody finishes. The only workable approach is to have the photos sort themselves, which they can once each one knows when and where it was taken.
That is the whole trick. Structure that depends on you remembering something will not survive fifty thousand files. Structure derived from the photo's own information will, and it stays correct when you copy it to another machine.
Give the app a folder and a pattern, and it does the rest: files named by date and place, folders by year and month, screenshots moved aside, duplicates skipped. A library that was one enormous unsorted dump becomes something you can browse by the time you come back from lunch. Use the preview first to see the structure before anything is written. The first 500 photos are free, which is the sample run worth doing before the real one.