Need advice before iCloud photo sync

I’ll try to make this as concise and clear as possible. I used to run a tight ship with my photos. Take them on my phone (or digital camera way back when), move them from camera roll to laptop, organize the files then I’d sync them back onto my phone and they’d be perfectly organized on both laptop and phone. Well this hasn’t been the case for a while now and I’m looking for some advice as I want to get everything organized and on iCloud. Current status on my phone: I have photos on my phone that are “from my Mac”. I also have at least the last 5 years of photos unorganized on my camera roll. External drive: I have all of the photos that are on my phone as “from my Mac” as well as some others not on my phone. I have a MacBook Air and haven’t moved any photo files on it because I’m confused as to what the next best step is to achieve my goal. I want to have all photos on my MacBook and phone and synced via iCloud. My worry is that if I sync my iPhone photos to iCloud and then separately move the files from my drive onto my MacBook, that I’ll have duplicates of thousands of files. Is anyone familiar with the best way to sort out my situation? Happy to provide any more details that might help answer my question.