Most of us have a collection of photos on our computer. In a perfect world, they would all be organized nicely in a program that allowed us to view them by date, or any other criteria we might have. On a Mac that, program used to be iPhoto. Since 2015, the current application is called Photos. I am going to use Apple Photos to refer to the program.

When I work with a client, photo organization is often an area of concern for various reasons:

Photos are not all in one place.
Some might be in the Apple Photos library. Others are on the desktop, in downloads, on their phones and iPads, on older computers, on CDs, perhaps saved to external drives, or on thumb drives. Everything can be consolidated into one Apple Photos library. With the special tools I use, albums from other libraries can also be included.

There seem to be duplicates… lots of duplicates.
Often there are duplicates within Apple Photos, and often the same photo is various places on the computer. I can explain why this happens and help you deal with duplicates.

The computer is full and working with photos has become problematic.
You may not have room on your computer to wrangle your photos into submission. Additionally, you need a really fast computer with a lot of (RAM) memory to keep up with large Apple Photos libraries. With large libraries, you generally need a computer with a solid state drive (SSD) instead of a (rotational) hard drive. SSDs are two to ten times faster than hard drives. Unless you have a fairly small amount of images and videos, it is hard to find solutions that don’t require upgrades to your hardware. Call or email me if you are planning on purchasing a new computer or upgrading the one you have. I can advise you on what makes the most sense.

Other Issues & Backing Up
There are actually lots of other things that may have gone wrong. I can usually sort these out. No matter what the issue, your best chance to hang on to photos, videos, and the organization you have created, is to always have current backups. I recommend using both of these techniques: Use Time Machine to back up to a local external drive (attached to your computer). Use a cloud-based backup service to back up your entire computer. I recommend Backblaze, which charges $100/year for unlimited data backups.