Losing photos is the worst!
This is how I keep mine safe for the long haul!
My Photo Workflow
I keep EVERYTHING photo and video related in Photos and synced with iCloud Photo Library.
They range from about 2007 - 2023 (with some scans of paper photos from earlier)
As of February 2023, I have 53,415 photos and 1,650 videos in there and Photos runs great!
Organization
I have the standard Photos provided categories:
Library
Memories
People
Places
Favorites
Recents
Imports
Recently
Deleted
I then also organize things into Albums, and each of those albums are in broader year based albums.
I also have created smart albums for every year that will show me every photo from a given year since every photo is not in an album. Also a special album to show me me anything that hasn’t uploaded to iCloud for some reason.
All this being said, search works pretty damn well in Photos so I can see a day in the near future where I don’t do any manual organization and just search for things: “Cats” “Jason” “2017” and so on..