Digital Decluttering: More Accounts and Photo Collection Consolidation Progress (Premium)

Back in November, I wrote about an unexpected change at Google Workspace by which the firm no longer allows individual accounts on Workspace Business Starter to purchase additional storage. I would simply upgrade my primary account, [email protected] to Workspace Business Standard (at a cost of $12 per month vs. $6 for Business Starter), which would give me the 2 TB of storage I was already enjoying but Google won’t allow that. Or, I could move the content that I’m storing there—primarily my work archives and my Google Photos-based photo collection to my personal Gmail account, where it’s easy and inexpensive to buy additional storage through Google One.

On November 11, I contacted Google Workspace support to see about upgrading just that one account (we have others for various reasons on the site) to Workspace Business Standard. And on November 13, I was asked to provide my updated company information (domain, name, address) so that they could do as I wanted. Good news, I thought.

Not exactly.

Two weeks passed, with daily notifications from Google Workspace that I was over my storage limit but no news from support. I wrote back to Workspace support repeatedly to find out what was happening. Then, on November 30, I finally received this insane response out of nowhere:

Greetings from the Google Workspace Team

Hello there,

When I pull up your account I see

Legal Address
45 Đ. Võ Thị Sáu, Đa Kao
Quận 1, Ho Chi Minh City

Vietnam

Is this correct?

Sincerely,

Google Workspace Customer Renewal Team.

This, obviously, is not correct and I told them that. I have yet to hear back again despite having written back a few more times.

But this told me it was time to act: My grace period was ending in early January and rather than hope that Workspace support would somehow get its act together two months after I first instigated my request, I would need to start deleting my Workspace-based documents archive from Google Drive and photo collection from Google Photos.

Both tasks were time-consuming. And each had its difficulties.

As you may recall, I had successfully completed organizing my documents archive back in early September and had backed it up to several locations, one of which was the Google Drive associated with my Workspace account. And then, because of all the problems I’d had with OneDrive in Windows 11 version 23H2, I started experimenting with using Google Drive in Windows instead. That was so successful, I moved all of my current work—the writing for the site, the book updating, and so on—to Google Drive. The Google Drive that I was now going to stop using.

Put simply, I would need to move all of that content—my documents archive and my current work—to Google Drive on my Gmail account. Based on my previous experiences dealing with lots of cloud-based data, that would require me to configure my Gmail and Workspace accounts using the Google Drive desktop client on a single PC, syncing the Workspace content locally to that PC, and then moving it over to Gmail.

In the end, I took the extra step of attaching a 2 TB portable SSD to that PC so that I could copy from Workspace to the SSD, delete from Workspace, and then copy everything over to Gmail locally.

And that pretty much worked as expected, though it took most of the weekend: The documents archive is about 193 GB on disk, and I needed to sync it, in turn, in both directions (cloud to PC, then PC to cloud, with copies to/from the SSD in-between).

While that was happening, I interrupted my photo collection consolidation work (again, more on that in a moment) to delete all of the photos from my Workspace-based Google Photos. This, I figured, would be easy, as Google documents that you can SHIFT + click to select the entire collection, click a “Delete” button, and then empty trash to do so from the web client. What it doesn’t document is that this doesn’t work: If you select the most recent photo in the collection, scroll all the way down to the last photo, and then hold down SHIFT while selecting it, you only select those two photos now. You can’t select them all at once.

Sigh.

So I started experimenting. And what I discovered was that this SHIFT + click method does work from a Google Photos search results page. So I searched for one year (say, 2012, I don’t recall), and was able to SHIFT + click delete all the photos from that one year with a single click. And so that’s what I did, year by plodding year, and though each deletion took a while to process, at least it worked.

Until it didn’t. Eventually, I started getting “Couldn’t delete” errors, and so I experimented some more. With older years instead of newer years. And then with subsets of years. And various-sized groups of photos. At some point on Sunday, I had reached the frustrating point where nothing was working. And while I had deleted most of the collection, big chunks remained. And my attempts at emptying the Google Photos trash didn’t seem to be working: Each time I did that and refreshed the screen, there were more files in there.

One issue that both Google Drive and Google Photos share is that file deletions don’t register immediately in the “storage used” display on either service. And so when I went to bed Sunday, Workspace told me that I was still using about 501 GB of my 150 GB of available storage. But when I got up this morning, it had caught up: Now it more accurately showed that I was using only 52 GB or so. For the first time since November 7, I wasn’t getting a “pooled storage limit exceeded” warning. So that was at least a step in the right direction.

I had hoped and expected to completely delete all of my Workspace-based photos over the weekend and would have if it weren’t for the weird photo deletion bug. And this isn’t the type of thing I want to work on during the day, as I reserve that time for writing work related to the site and the book. But I will plug away at that each night this week. And I’m sure I’ll get there eventually.

I will point out, however, that these issues are a good example of the “grass always being greener on the other side of the fence.” I was so excited by how reliably the Google Drive desktop client worked—and, to be fair, I still am—and I know this rankled some Microsoft-leaning folks. But Google Drive, like OneDrive, isn’t perfect: You cannot, for example, see the size of a folder from the desktop, web, or mobile clients, a basic and obvious feature. And Google Photos likewise doesn’t offer a simple way to just delete your entire collection, another basic and obvious feature. So there you go: Switching products or services solves some problems, but it can introduce others as well.

Concurrent to all this, I also continued working on the photo consolidation project I discussed in Digital Decluttering: Photo Collection Consolidation is Back on Track (Premium).

As you may recall, I ended up splitting this work into two phases, one being the photos up through 2011 and the second being the photos from 2012 to present. And at the time of that writing, I had successfully consolidated the older half of my OneDrive Camera Roll and OneDrive Photo collection folders on a laptop to which both folders are synced. And I had started working to consolidate the older half of my Google Photos collection, downloaded from Takeout to the same laptop, into that single, consolidated collection. I had originally hoped to get through 2011 by the end of the weekend.

I got close. Thanks in part to the unexpected Workspace content migration noted above and in part because the photos get harder to work with as you move forward in time—the more recent years have far more photos in them than the older photos, plus many photo scans with bad meta-data, video clips, screenshots, and other superfluous content that needs to be sorted through—I ended up consolidating the Google Photos collection with OneDrive through 2007 by the end of the weekend. Which is nothing to be ashamed of: It’s a lot of work.

So far, the process I described in that previous article has worked pretty well: I use Bulk Rename Utility with my custom folder naming script to copy a year’s worth of photos from Google Photos into a temporary folder, put that folder side-by-side with the same year-based folder in my OneDrive Photo collection, and compare the date-based folders (2001-12-16 on the left, say, with 2001-12-16 Mark and Santa on the right) and consolidate as necessary.

File Explorer in Windows 11 version 23H2 is buggy enough that I need to force-kill and restart explorer.exe repeatedly each time I do this work. But the work is also slowing down otherwise.

Each year, for example, there are more and more loose photos on the left (from Google Photos) that aren’t organized by BRU into date-based folders: These have bad meta-data (or are videos, which don’t have Data taken meta-data) and need to be fixed before they’re moved over to the right (OneDrive, the “master” consolidated photo collection). For example, there were 17 loose photos in 2001, but over 1000 in 2004, mostly photo scans with bad or missing meta-data. And again and again, I have found photos in the Google Photos version of the collection that aren’t in OneDrive. I’m reminded of why this work is worth the effort each time.

I will finish up consolidating 2008 through 2011 before moving on to phase two (2012 to present), as I think of it. The consolidated collection is syncing to OneDrive as I work, but I will upload the newly consolidated photos from phase one (through 2011) to Google Photos (and to Amazon Photos and the NAS) first so that the updated version is replicated to a few different places.

Phase two will require additional tools and more automation because of the volume and complexity of the files. Key among those tools will be a file deduplication utility like AllDup, since I know that part of my collection has lots of redundant phone photo backups. And I think all the experimentation I did with subsets of these collections between September and November will help with the workflow. I got into a pretty good groove with that too.

Despite the Google Workspace nonsense, I’m getting there.