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?
The way Android does it makes sense if you know where your image was saved from and how long ago you saved it. I suppose you could make folders, but they'd show up in addition to the others.
I suppose the way I'd do it if I went full-time Android is, I'd look at the folders that worked for me on iOS, and make them within (or outside of, not sure) the camera/DCIM folder, and manually sort. Then use a gallery app to hide the root folder. Then you kinda have the best of both, and all the images are accessible to the file system and all apps.