Bit of back story, I started with Android (2010-2014) but have used iPhone since. I have an Android phone (Galaxy S10) I use for some things. My wife is an Android user since 2010 but is not very technical.
Right to my question: how do you manage your images/gallery on Android? I know that the Android OS defaults to sorting by folder. I used to use QuickPic; my current gallery of choice is Google Gallery, for its simplicity (and being free). So you have your camera pics, your saved images, images from various apps tend to be in folders for those apps.
Is that organisation good enough for you? Or do you do more?
Jumping over to the Apple side, every image, saved or taken with the camera, goes into the "Camera Roll" gallery. It's all one monolithic thing. You can create albums within it, but unless you did that from the start, it's a monolithic task. Fortunately I found an app that makes it easy. It shows me an image, I tap the album I want to put it in. After a few hours, I had it sorted. Now I have a wallpaper album, an album of pictures of my wife, an album for holidays, an album for friends, one for cars, one for food... and so on. Every week or so I go back to this app to get the unsorted ones.
Yesterday I was looking at my wife's phone, and something bothered me. It occurred to me that, she's had this phone for 3 years and has never changed the lock screen. She said she tried to do it once and couldn't figure it out, so she left it alone. (It's a Galaxy S22, if you're curious.) I had a minute, so I dived in. Found it pretty quick. Asked her what she wanted. She said there was a wallpaper from this anime I sent her once... This is when I found an issue with Android's image organisation. It was hard to navigate and completely unsorted. (Likely, partially user error, which is why I'm asking here!) I solved the problem by going to my iPhone, going into my wallpaper album, finding the wallpaper in question, sending it over to her, and then picking it as the most recent image. I got the clock set up with her favourite colour, and now she's super happy with her lock screen. It's no longer "just there," now it reflects its owner better. Win/win. (Of course, if you looked at my S10, you'd never know it was managed by an "Apple guy." Nova Prime, everything customised to specification... honestly still an awesome phone, and does a few things better than my five-years-newer 16 Pro Max.)
So, TL;DR: are you happy with the folder-based (source-based) gallery system in Android? If so, how do you make it work for you? How can a user with something like 2500 saved images best make it work for them?
I like android's folder based management and always found the iPhone way too simplistic. I use fossify gallery with the folder view as default and some folders (Camera, Downloads, Screenshots) pinned at the top. Some pictures I move to other folders, some stay in their original folder. So there are only some folders I care about and the rest (including app folders) are just temporary locations and can be safely deleted at any moment. All the important folders are in the SD card which just gets moved to the new phone when it's time to switch, keeping the exact same hierarchy.
One thing that's missing is a way to add tags to images so you can group stuff across folders. There are apps and cloud services that provide this but it'd be nice to have something non-proprietary that works on the device itself through image metadata or similar.
Note: I've been doing this for a while and across phones and have something like 10000 images in my phone right now.
I always thought Apple (Mac? The whole ecosystem?) had image tagging, but other than the coloured folders you can make (and have been able to do since the 90s) I haven't really seen it. At this point I have too many images to tag. The tagging system would be better since I have images in multiple albums, so tags seem more appropriate a feature, especially when you're dealing with more direct files/folders like in Android (whereas I'm sure my albums in iOS are just virtual folders, or they might as well be tags).
I can't do SD cards though. I get it. I used to do SD cards. They're so slow. At one point Samsung was talking about doing a new SD card format that would introduce higher speeds. But I get it, being able to move everything from one system to another makes sense, at least if it's the same brand. When I was on Android, I'd go to a different OEM each time. Samsung to Motorola to Samsung again and then lastly to HTC. (I switched before the Pixel was a thing. Sadly I missed that boat, Pixel 1 was pretty cool at the time. It was like "here's an iPhone but better in every way." Good times.)
Out of curiosity what do you find slow in SD cards? I don't think I've ever seen a delay when taking photos/videos and watching a movie in HD directly from the SD card is also fine. It's slower when moving stuff around but that's not something that needs to happen immediately.
No, SD access is fine. I have one in my Switch and I think Skyrim is running off of it. That’s wild! Yes, I mainly mean the data transfer speeds. They’re slow and don’t need to be.
I put HD/4K movies on my phone over WiFi and the speeds are incredible. SD cards could never. Ii is a shame so many new Android phones are leaving the card slots out, especially the expensive ones, and they should be replacing them with a new standard. I think the new Express cards the Switch 2 uses are faster. I’d almost rather use a flash drive or portable SSD — I got a 2TB Samsung T7 a couple years ago for about $120. Strap that to the back of a phone. (Even iPhone can do that now!)
I see, it's not a deal breaker for me but it makes sense if you transfer files very often.