There is no way to weed out the Recents Album without deleting the photos from your Photos Library completely.
All albums in the Library section created for us automatically by Photos are populated automatically based on all items in our Photos Library. If you want to remove photos from Recents or other albums without deleting them everywhere, you can only hide them, but then you will not see them in the albums any longer as well in the most recent versions of Photos.
We can only remove photos from albums we create ourselves. You could create your own album "My Recents" and add all recent photos to your own "My Recents". Then use this album as a starting point to organize your new photos. Once you add a photo to other albums remove them from "my Recents".
Or tag the photos you added to an album with the Favorites heart ♡. Then you can see at a glance, if a photo is already in an album. This will work well, if you only are keeping important photos in your albums. There is really no point to adding unimportant photos to albums - they will just fill the album make it more difficult to browse.
If you are already using iCloud Photos I recommend to try this approach: On iOS 16 and iOS 17 you can use the Shared iCloud Photos Library to split your Photos Library into two sections, a Shared Library and a Private Library.
- Move the photos you have already organized in albums to the Shared iCloud Library.
- The mess that needs organizing will remain in the Private Library.
We can easily toggle between the Shared Library view, the Private Library view or view both libraries together.
This is the easiest way to organize the library, when you are already using iCloud Photos and do not need the Shared library for sharing your photos. Now you can set the Photos to show only your Shared library, before giving your iPhone or iPad to someone to look at your photos, and they will only be able to see your well organized photos, not the mess you still have to weed out.
See: Using the Shared iCloud Photos Library to have two separate libraries on all devices - Apple Community
See also: Things to consider when setting up the Shared iCloud Photos Library in Photo 8 on Ventura
