How I cleaned up the thousands of photos and videos I posted online

My multimedia situation was a mess. After decades of taking photos and videos, I had stuff in five clouds — Google, Apple, Flickr, Dropbox, OneDrive — and also in offline locations like flash drives, flash drives, hard drives…

I’m not a professional photographer, just a guy who has taken his share of photos and videos over the years. You know how it is. You’re on a road trip, and you’ve taken a bunch of nature photos, but after a few years, they no longer look as stunning as they did from the car. Or my cat. Why did you take so many pictures of them sleeping? Cats are cute, we get that, but do I need a lot of pictures to prove it?

Another problem is that I’ve used phones with different operating systems – Blackberry, Samsung, Motorola (Android), Nokia (Windows) and now iPhone (iOS) – and different backup systems. I was breaking the rule. The vast majority of people Do not deviate from one type of operating system.

It was like throwing things in the garage or storage closet. It gets messier and messier. You tell yourself one day you’ll clean it up, but that day never comes.

This excessive procrastination has a price. The more cloud storage locations you have, the more you’ll pay, and as megabytes and gigabytes pile up, you’ll often have to pay more each month for higher storage limits.

It’s time to suck it up and clean it. After checking various recommendations on how to do this, I formulated my plan. My steps will be: Add, Arrange, and Merge.

Collect everything

First, I identified the cloud storage platforms where I kept my photos and videos. Then I located the photos and videos I had on the various transition drives, flash drives, Solid state drives And hard disks. I even overclocked a couple of old desktop computers and Laptops To see if I have anything there. Then I loaded the multimedia from the external drives onto my laptop.

My situation was a bit mixed. It’s much easier for people who have multiple media stored in only one or two cloud services.

Read more: From photo backups to my cloud server: my journey into home data storage

Then I moved on to decluttering, which is probably the most time consuming and difficult step. I went into each of my cloud storage accounts and got rid of photos that were blurry or poor quality, duplicates or redundant, and photos that — now, years later — I can’t even remember why I took them in the first place.

Duplicates are a big problem. This can happen for several reasons. If you automatically back up from different devices — perhaps an iPhone, tablet, or digital camera — the same photo can be backed up three times. Or you could be backing up a photo shared with you on WhatsApp, but you already have that photo synced to your cloud storage.

There are at least two ways to remove duplicates. There are services that can scan and locate your cloud storage, and services that can scan your photos and videos after they’re downloaded to your hard drive.

Cloud copy finder ($40 for 3 months, $70 for 1 year, $96 for 2 years) Scans multiple cloud storage services (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, Amazon S3) at once to find duplicates. Eliminate duplicates It can do the same with Google, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc. (but not iCloud). It costs $8 in the App Store.

Google also has a built-in tool that can find and delete faded photos and screenshots; It’s in Storage department management.

You can also remove duplicates by syncing Google Cloud, OneDrive, and Dropbox to your local desktop, then using Duplicate photos cleaner To find duplicates. The app can scan your synced photos and find duplicates as well as edited, cropped or resized versions. You can then delete them and sync the changes back to the cloud, thus removing the deception.

the CCleaner The free version of the app can scan your photo library and find duplicate photos that match, but not just similar or modified ones. The premium version of CCleaner ($90 per year) can find photos that are blurry, poorly lit, or of poor quality.

There are some free duplicate finders as well. DupeGuru Scans for duplicates and similar images on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Awesome duplicate photo finder It is a Windows program that identifies duplicates and cropped or saved images using color filters. Remo duplicate photos remover It can scan your iPhone and Android camera rolls for exact matches and similar photos, like those captured using burst mode.

I also went through all my videos and deleted the ones I no longer wanted or needed. Here’s the key – on the iPhone, a 30-second video can range in size from 40MB (standard HD) to over 200MB (4K), compared to 2-5MB for a typical photo. Reducing videos can significantly reduce your cloud storage load.

You can also decide to skip the organizing process if you don’t have the time or want to do it later, after you’ve consolidated all your photos into one place.

Use the fallback rule of 3-2-1

After I got rid of all my unwanted photos and videos, I decided to use Google Photos as my main cloud storage location. I use Google a lot to create documents, and it’s an easy backup of my iPhone, so it seems like a natural cloud solution.

Apple allows Google to transfer copies of photos and video from its servers to Google’s servers. But to transfer multimedia from OneDrive, Dropbox, Flickr, and external drives, I needed to download copies to my hard drive and then upload them to Google.

If you only use iPhone and iPad for multimedia creation, you can just use Apple’s iCloud for your storage needs.

Prices vary for each of the major cloud services. Apple charges $1 per month for 50GB, $3 for 200GB, and $10 for 2TB. Google charges $2 for 100GB, $3 for 200GB, and $10 for 2TB. Microsoft’s OneDrive bundles cloud storage with Microsoft’s Office 365 apps, resulting in a $10 per month fee for 1TB of storage.

Amazon Prime members get unlimited storage space for photos and 5GB for videos and documents. If you need more storage space for videos, you can pay $2 for 100GB and $7 per month for 1TB.

Whichever way you go, understand the 3-2-1 backup rule: 3 Copies of all data; 2 Copy to two different storage media, such as a cloud service and a local drive; and 1 A copy is located a few miles away from the others.

Basically, it’s a way to ensure that you don’t lose all your precious photos and videos by relying on just one location for your data.

I’ve gone with one of the most common strategies to implement 3-2-1 The reserve rule. I downloaded all my photos and videos to my computer (#1), then backed them up to an external hard drive (#2), and finally backed them all up to the Google Cloud (#3). 3-2-1 achieved!

However, it is not a one-time solution. If you go this route, you’ll need to regularly update your local and external drives with the latest photos and videos. For example, if you add, say, 200 photos to the Google Cloud, you’ll need to download them to your local and external storage locations so you can keep three copies of all the data.

If you don’t have an external hard drive yet, CNET does A large number of recommended For different storage needs.

Great for getting this done

Although it took a fair amount of time to organize my multimedia, it felt great to finally get it done. It inspired me to create a few print photo books and digital frames, and it’s been nice to be more intentional about all the photos and videos I take rather than just putting them in a digital shoebox.

I’ve also reduced my subscription costs. Before I cut and copied my own multimedia, I was paying roughly $300 a year for storage on four cloud systems for roughly 400GB, which, compared to a lot of other systems, isn’t a lot of data. Anyway, I reduced that amount enough to get to Google’s 400GB storage plan, which costs $3 per month for three months and then $5 per month after that.

My annual subscription costs have gone from roughly $300 to less than $60.

Now, if I could just get to that storage locker…