I'm not sure what's keeping you from sorting your pictures into albums. By "photos folder," do you mean the Photos app? My sidebar looks, in part, like this:
with pictures in albums and albums in folders and folders inside other folders, and so on. I'm not sure what you mean by "my pile isn't getting any smaller." Surely you don't want fewer pictures?
Perhaps you haven't read about how Photos works with albums. In Photos, pictures aren't exactly "in" an album. When you "put a picture into an album," its name is added to a list of pictures to display together when the album is clicked, kind of like a music playlist, but for pictures. So two albums can both have the same picture name in their lists (like two playlists with the same song,) and that picture will show up when you click either album, but there's only one picture file-- it's just on multiple lists. And when you remove a picture from an album, its name remains in the lists of other albums, and the file still remains in your Library. You don't get fewer pictures in your Library because you remove one from an album
So albums give a specific view of your pictures. The picture of "Aunt Ethel at the Grand Canyon" can be in the "Aunt Ethel" album with other pictures of Aunt Ethel, and it can also be in the "Grand Canyon" album with pictures of other people at the Grand Canyon. And it can also be in a the "September 2015" album with other thing that happened then. Each album is pointing to a single file stored in the Photos Library, so having pictures in multiple albums takes up no more storage space. As you can imagine, this is very powerful in organizing pictures.
There are special views provided by Apple. The Library View isn't really an "album"-- it provides a view of all of the pictures in the entire Library in the order of their "taken" dates. You can't remove a picture from the Library View without deleting it entirely. The Recents view shows all the pictures in the entire Library in the order they were added.You can't change how these views work. These albums always provide the same view so that, when something goes wrong or seems off, you (and we) can depend on them always showing the same thing, and there's no chance that someone snuck in and changed the order or removed pictures.
If you want to see pictures that haven't yet been listed in an album, you can use a "Smart Album." In the Menu, you choose File>New Smart Album. You can title the new album, and then you set it to Album>is not>Any, and you get all the pictures not yet in any album.
Photos is an Image management system with a pretty darn good editor. You have a lot of ways to organize your pictures. Does this make sense of what's going on?
