How to consolidate travel albums into one?

Just clarifying vocabulary:

Albums contain pictures.

Folders contain Albums and also other folders. Folders can't have pictures that are not in albums.

And, as MrHoffman says, Albums are lists of pictures to see together. This means that pictures can be in multiple albums-- on multiple lists, without taking up any extra storage space.

So the picture "Me and Uncle Mel in Prague" can be in the "Me" album and in the "Uncle Mel" album and in the "Prague Album" without taking any more storage. And the "Me and "Uncle Mel" albums can be in the "Family" folder, and the "Prague" album can be in the the "Czech" Folder. The "Czech" folder can be in the "Europe" folder. And "Me and Uncle Mel in Prague" can also be in the October 2022 Album which is in the 2022 folder.

I have maybe a thousand Albums or more, but I don't have to sort through them all -- the "Albums" section in Photos shows a much smaller list of Folders.

This offers amazing opportunities for organizing pictures!

All the photos are stored in the library, and are not stored in any albums. Albums don’t actually contain the photos, they’re a grouping used for viewing. The photos are all stored in the library. Not in albums.

Folders can contain folders and albums, but only folders can be nested.

Create and work with photo albums on iPhone - Apple Support

Which means you can have a city folder, and place albums there.

"Original Title: is it possible to consolidate albums so that I have 1 album with multiple folders in it?"

It is just the other way round: You can have folders with multiple albums in them.

For example, I have one folder named "⛵️_Travel Vacation Folder"

• with subfolders for groups of ten years,
• with subfolders for each year,
• with albums for each photo shooting trip.

With a few clicks into the sidebar in Photos I can easily find and open the album I want. Here is a screenshot from Photos for Mac.

Are you asking about Photos for Mac or Photos on a mobile device? iPhone, iPod, iPad, Vision Pro?

On the Mac we can easily drag existing albums into new folders, but on the mobile devices it is better to plan ahead and create the folders before we create the albums, so we can create the albums directly inside the folders where we want them.

I am managing my folders on the Mac and are syncing them with iCloud Photos to my iPhone and iPad and the Vision Pro.

I am trying to keep the number of subfolders and albums in each folder small. This makes it easier on devices with small displays to find something in a folder, because we do not have to scroll. Opening a sunflower is easier than scrolling. But we need a good plan how to design the folder structure, so we know the path to each album.

léonie wrote: … On the Mac we can easily drag existing albums into new folders, but on the mobile devices it is better to plan ahead and create the folders before we create the albums, so we can create the albums directly inside the folders where we want them.

That is so true! Setting up Folders and albums on an iPhone is easy only if you work out the structure ahead of time and create all the albums and folders before you sort the pictures. While that's surely the way to go, unfortunately for me, that seems backwards. It's a bit harder fixing it up if you suddenly figure out that all these albums should have been in other folders. They don't move-- you have to create new ones.