What Is the Fastest Way to Organize Thousands of Photos?
Sorting a large library by hand is not realistic. Here is the order of operations that actually works.
Fix the dates first. Everything else depends on them. Folders, filenames, timelines and search all read the date, so organising before the dates are right means doing the work twice.
Then let the dates do the sorting. Year and month folders, and date-first filenames, give you a library that works in any app on any system, without a database or a special program to read it.
Takeout JSON Metadata Fixer does both in one run: it writes the real dates in, then renames and re-folders by those dates. Thousands of photos take minutes rather than weekends. Free for your first 500.