I'll have a look into those apps. I used a really good duplicate remover in OSX (from the Mac App Store) for one of my libraries stored there, but of course it's probably not available for Windows. So much of the software on the Microsoft Store looks really low quality unfortunately. The open-source stuff is probably better there. Hopefully VisiPics will be able to identify thumbnails and remove those.
Yeah, the Microsoft store, much like the Android store, is a bit rough... but there's some gems there. What I can't find there, instead of installing various apps to the system, I fill out the rest of my app needs as much as possible using
PortableApps. This lets me lock the system down to near Windows 10S levels, but lets me run and update apps that don't need admin privileges to install or update in system locations.
This also lets me back up my non-MS Store apps so they're just there after a system restore. I'll have the PortableApps launcher load on login so it auto-updates, and once it's done, I just close it out so it isn't running in the background. I've also got these scripts that auto-adds, updates, removes and replaces shortcuts from PortableApps into the Windows menu so I don't need the PortableApps launcher... but I can't remember where I got it. If you'd like it, I can email you a copy. This is the method that I use to install Gimp, Inkscape, LibreOffice, Audacity, KeePass XC, and VLC. In fact, I also keep a copy of Firefox on the thing, and use a massive micro USB thumb drive partitioned into two separate Bitlocker encrypted drives with PortableApps installed on the first partition, and the second partition used for my system backup drive with Windows. This gives me an alternative sneakernet backup of my system where most of my important apps and files can just be plugged into any Windows machine and accessible once I enter the password.
Would Microsoft Photos be able to sort the files into folders by year/month/day?
Photos just kinda lumps everything together in a "Camera Roll" folder, and sorts everything in app by metadata and facial recognition. If you want a more fine-tuned directory structure, you might want to use DigiKam instead.
I've got about 150GB of photos on the SSD in this laptop (much of which is in folders like 'imported from Dropbox' or 'from old phone' and full of duplicates, along with a bunch of external hard drives and USB thumb drives, backups on iCloud, Amazon Photos, Dropbox, Google and OneDrive, and I'm still paying for three of those services (iCloud, Google One and an Office 365 sub). I really need to sort it out once and for all, and then get rid of most of my USB drives. It's a real mess.
Plan would be to have it on one cloud service, one external HDD or USB stick here and another one at my parents' place for off-site backup. Hopefully there's a more elegant way to sync the library to the external media than simply copying files over.
I've even been paying extra for an Internet plan with a higher upload speed because I've been meaning to do this and sync it all to the cloud (I was on an ADSL plan with a 1mbps upload until November, now on a plan with 40mbps upload). Sort it out, drop to a cheaper plan and cancel at least one of the cloud services (I don't really need iCloud in particular).
I know the pain and feeling with the speed upgrade myself. The wife's having to teach online this semester, and Zoom is bandwidth hungry. We finally had to switch over to a 60/60 fiber plan to get some decent upload speeds, but it's opened up some... possibilities.
Look into
Nextcloud, there's builds for Raspberry Pi. You also might find a purpose and use for
Cryptomator.