Erase from 'Recents' album

You can do what I do.

Copy/Import your photos to a computer, a PC is fine as long as it has iTunes.

Once you are sure your photos are on the PC make a backup or copy them to an external drive to be double safe.

Then delete the photos from the iPhone.

First create a master folder in File Explorer, i.e., iPhone Photos.

Then subfolders with the album names.

Sync from the master folder back to your phone using iTunes (look in iTunes and click on the subfolders/albums).

The albums will appear on your iPhone as you named them with File Explorer.

You can also not delete the photos from the phone until you have done the above and if you are happy with the results then delete the iPhone photos. Note however that you will not be able to delete the synced photos directly from your iPhone, you will have to do a new Sync with no photos selected (or just the photos you still want on the phone).

The only “hard” copy of photos is the Library. Photos in albums are not physically in an album, which just contains links to the photos in the Library. This applies to the Recents album also; you can have the same photo in multiple albums.

If you don’t have a computer you need a backup strategy to avoid losing photos (and other data). The easiest way is to enable syncing to iCloud (which is not the same as backing up to iCloud).

iCloud+ has 2 independent functions. iCloud backups, and iCloud sync. It’s confusing because they both have the same name prefix. But they have no connection with each other. Go to Settings/[your name]/iCloud. You will see a bunch of switches (with iOS 16 also tap Show All). When you turn on a switch that data type will sync to iCloud. If you do this on multiple devices that share an Apple ID the selected data will sync to all of those devices, but will also be available by logging in to https://icloud.com from any device with a browser.

You can also turn on iCloud Backups. This will back up your phone every night if the phone is plugged in, connected to Wi-Fi and locked.

If the photos are important consider a backup way of preserving them such as dropbox, box.com, Google Photos, Shutterfly, etc. All of these have apps that will automatically back up your photos to your account in the provider’s cloud.

But note that anything that you sync by the first method will be excluded from the iCloud backups.

thomas6464 wrote:

and start sorting them into albums, without keeping a copy of it in 'recents'.

Albums do not keep copy of the Photos instead it keeps link of the photo in the recent,