Digital Decluttering: Resolutions (Premium)

Dumped unceremoniously into 2024, this feels like a good time to look back at the digital decluttering work I took on last year, provide a progress update, and then look ahead to what I hope to accomplish in the new year.

I originally expected my 2023 digital decluttering efforts to unfold similarly to previous years where a burst of activity and progress is inevitably undermined by distractions and other work and then a long period of inactivity. This is understandable and maybe even normal, as decluttering—digital or otherwise—is difficult and tedious. And it’s all too easy to fall into what I now know is called doom piling, where you organize clutter rather than remove it from your life. I’ve been doing that my whole life.

But 2023 was different from past decluttering efforts. We moved from a very large house with infinite space to a very small apartment with limited space, forcing the issue on physical clutter. And in being confronted by what remained of the physical items I wanted to scan and discard—paper photos and documents, kids’ drawings, newspaper clippings, and other similar items—it occurred to me that it was also time to organize and clean up the digital end of this process. This meant my documents archive, which dates back 30 years, and my photo collection—which spans my life and more, and I soon learned was multiple collections, none of which was a superset of the others—and other digitally stored content.

Without getting into the weeds, my document archive consolidation and organization and what I thought was my final round of paper scanning/digitization and organization both went very well. In less than a month, I had fully consolidated my document archive and replicated it in several online services and on a NAS. And as I wound down the scanning in a crazy long weekend of work—again, so I thought—this success inspired me to look at other digital decluttering projects, like cleaning up and organizing my legacy music collection and re-digitizing some home videos (including at least one that had never before been digitized).

And then I crashed. Hard. Despite not being done with my digitization work, especially on the organizational end, I decided it was time to take something I’d tried to do many times but failed at repeatedly and consolidate and organize my online accounts by separating my work and personal activities. But this went just as badly as it always had, and so I gave up on this task so I could focus, again, on a single task, in this case the photo collections and all the related unfinished scan organizational work.

Over the next two months, I worked with various offline versions of my photo collections and a growing set of tools to figure out the best and most automated process I could use to tame this beast. And then two milestones in November got me back on track: Google screwed over Workspace customers like me who used its storage upgrade subscription by canceling that offering, and through months of experimentation, I had finally figured out how to consolidate those photo collections.

To solve the Google problem, I purchased a 2 TB Google One subscription for my personal Gmail account and moved my document archive and photo collection from Workspace to Gmail. And I relentlessly plowed away at my photo collection consolidation work, making progress every single day. By the third week of December, I had consolidated all of our photos through 2012.

Since then, I have completed consolidating the collection through 2018, and I’m surprised to report that the work has only gotten easier, thanks to ongoing improvements to my tool usage. You may recall that I’d been using and recommending a complex but powerful utility called Bulk Rename Utility (BRU) to organize thousands of photos into date-based folder structures, and that did work well. But the issue is that some image files don’t have correct/any “Date taken” meta-data, and neither do other file types, like MP4s and other video files, which often use “Media created” instead. Because I couldn’t figure out how to get BRU to recognize the underlying date in these other files types, each year contained some number of files that I had to manually sort and figure out. And that number got bigger with each passing year, slowing my down.

At first, I developed new processes for simplifying that work. For example, it’s not hard to group a folder full of files by file type and then move each file type into its own subfolder (PNG, GIF, MP4, etc.). But then I realized that this wasn’t necessary: After experimenting with a utility called MediaSorter that understands all of the date-based meta-data used by all image and video file types, I realized I could use that app instead of BRU to organize folders of unsorted and unorganized files (like a year’s worth of Google Photos files) into the date-based folder structures I want in one fell swoop.

This has worked amazingly well, and because I use AllDup to accurately compare files from multiple folders while consolidating and then delete all the duplicates, I know that all the photos and videos I’m copying into the main collection (in OneDrive) are unique.

And that’s why the consolidation process is succeeding: Yes, the more recent years—the smartphone years, as I think of them—have far more photos than previous years. But they also have better meta-data and are thus more easily organized in an automated way using MediaSorter. And so I’ve made great progress, each day chipping away at each year, consolidating everything into a Photo collection in my OneDrive. Once this work is done, I will replicate it to Google Photos, Amazon Photos, and the NAS (which I will then replace with a new, more modern NAS, another 2023 goal I’ve had to push back). And as with my document archive, the future is mostly automated: We already back up all of our phone-based photos to Google Photos, OneDrive, and Amazon Photos, and so the only real work I’ll have in the future will be to make sure that OneDrive’s Camera roll remains organized (this is a setting in the phone app) and is periodically copied over to that Photo collection folder, which is organized with date-based sub-folders.

I’m looking forward to finishing this work, which will include cleaning up and organizing the remaining scanned photos and other paper-based items, and integrating them as needed into the documents archive or the photo collection. I don’t have an ETA on that per se. But it will happen sometime this month, I’m sure. As noted, I work on it every single day. (I dream about it sometimes, in very repetitive sequences that I find vaguely worrying. But this will end.)

And that’s when I will finally turn my attention to the decluttering tasks I didn’t finish in 2023, and some I didn’t even start. Some are related to Thurrott.com and other work-related tasks. Some are personal. And the range is broad, from consolidating which credit cards we use after ensuring we’re using the right cards with the right benefits (airline points, etc.) for our needs. Some are related to online accounts and include topics like consolidating password/account protection. There is still physical decluttering to do, and I’ll be using my office as a staging area for that. And the new NAS, which may turn into a second new NAS for Mexico City with replication across both if all goes well.

We moved twice this past year, from the house to an apartment in early 2023, and then from the apartment to a condo in late 2023. And we don’t know how long we’ll be here: A year at least, we hope, but it will depend on factors outside our control, including, sadly, the declining health of the condo’s owner. But barring any sudden emergency, my wife and I have a stated goal of decluttering as much as possible while we’re here so that it will be easier to move the next time, and going forward. And sitting here in my office, I can see what I need to eliminate. That’s by design: Instead of doom-piling this time, I’m confronted by the work each day. I’m hoping this inspires me to actually do it.

So I’ll check in again when the photo consolidation work concludes. That’s going to be a big day, and it’s coming up quickly. And then I will figure out the next steps.