Everything goes in iCloud Photo Library so it's always available to me on my phone or computer. There's about 2 TB of photos. It gets backed up to my Synology NAS via icloudpd in docker, and then uploaded to Amazon Glacier (3-2-1 backup)

For photos of our kids, we have an iCloud shared album that is shared with family (grandparents, aunts/uncles, close friends, etc) so that becomes the curation of all the photos of the kids. Not ideal since it's in lower resolution.

Every year for the kids birthdays I make a collage of their highlights of the past year and print it in A2 as birthday banner and these make for nice memories.

For memorable trips after the trip I go through and create an album and put it in an album. I like looking back at these when I'm feeling nostalgic or anxious about my place in life.

For stuff I like to refer to like hobby projects, stuff around the apartment (device setup/model numbers/wiring etc) etc I create albums and sort them in folders.

When I need to find a photo, if it's not in an album 80% of the time I find it through the geotagged world map feature. "that campsite that weekend was over here somewhere, oh there's that photo of the nice stream we bathed in". The other 20% is mostly through text search (Photos does OCR on all your photos) or date.

I do not take the time to remove duplicates etc, it would take weeks. I can do that when I'm retired...