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 capitalize the program name to avoid confusion.

When I see a client to work on their Mac, photo organization is often an area of concern for various reasons:

Photos are not all in once place.
Some might be in the 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 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 PHOTOS, and often the same photo is various places on the computer. I can explain why this happens and help you deal with duplicates.

Something went wrong when moving from iPhoto to PHOTOS.
Images seem to be missing. Events are missing. Albums are missing, or the contents of the albums are missing. I can usually remedy this situation.

You are still using iPhoto or want to be using iPhoto but can’t.
The last version of iPhoto will still run on a recent Macs, but not all the features will work. Some folks have a slightly older version of iPhoto, so it won’t run at all. If you have a huge collection of images and/or videos, iPhoto will often crash. That is partly why Apple discontinued the program. If you are using iPhoto, it is time to switch to PHOTOS. Let me know if you want help with this transition.

Some of your photos are in iPhoto. Some are in PHOTOS. Some are in both!
When Apple first introduced PHOTOS, it was easy to keep using iPhoto as well. When you imported new photos, sometimes they went into one program, and sometimes the other. Often, the images you wanted were missing in the program you were using, so you adding them again. What a mess! I can go under the hood inside the old iPhoto library and extract those photos, and add them to PHOTOS, while deleting 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 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 $60/year for unlimited data backups.