Need help finding and organizing images

[challenged_101]

First off, my wife's passion is creating digital art and her tool of chose has been android devices. She'll fill up the devices until they"ll no longer function due to lack of space. Unfortunately most of the devices are running old versions of android so installing any new file management app is a issue.
I'm trying to get a handle on this by uploading and moving files to the sd card where possible. On a Samsung running android 6.0.1 I've found images in the following files.
MyFiles/LocalStorage/DeviceStorage/Pictures (118)
MyFiles/Images (1.7GB)
MyFiles/Downloaded Apps/Photos ( 382 MB)
I've already relocated the DCIM file (441) to the sd card. I understand these pics are from the camera. But before I move on, can someone explain these files? I'm assuming one is tied to Google Photos but if that is the case why is there data in the file if the pics have been uploaded to the cloud?
How about the pics I found in the downloaded apps file, I'm assuming they can now safely be deleted and where do they go after downloading?
Are images automatically saved in both Goggle Photos and Samsung's Gallery and if so what determines which app is used?
Thanks for any help on this problem.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! /DCIM is the folder associated the device's camera, and photos taken by the camera app are typically saved in /DCIM/Camera. There may be other subfolders of /DCIM (for example, on Samsung devices, the Screenshots folder is a subfolder of /DCIM, which is different from pretty much every other Android manufacturer who puts it as a subfolder of the /Pictures folder).

If Google Photos is set to auto-backup, then by default, all photos in the /DCIM/Camera directory will be backed up to the Google Photos cloud. Other folders can be made to back up automatically if the user toggles that on for the specific folder in the Google Photos app. When a photo is backed up to the cloud, it will still remain locally saved on the device. If you use the trash can icon in Google Photos, that will delete the photo from both the cloud and the device. If you tap the Menu button instead when viewing a photo and select Delete from Device, that will only delete the photo locally and preserve the backup in the cloud.

Google Photos has a Free Up Space feature that will automatically delete all photos and videos from the device's local storage that Google Photos knows have already been backed up to the cloud.

One of the tricky things is that the file manager you're using (presumably Samsung's My Files) is grouping photos for your convenience, but those photos could be from various different file directories. If you use the Explore or Browse option in the file manager, that should give you the actual file directories, and you can search around the directories to see where these images are located.

Google Photos is a gallery app that also gives you the option to back up your photos to the Google Photos cloud. Samsung Gallery is a simple gallery app that will just display images that are stored anywhere in local storage (although it might also have the option to connect to a Google Photos account -- I'm not sure about this). But remember that gallery apps aren't "locations" where photo files are stored -- they're simply displaying the image files that are saved in accessible storage directories of the phone.