Digital Decluttering: Photo Consolidation by the Numbers (Premium)

This morning, I finished cleaning up the photo collection I fully consolidated last week after several months of work. It’s time to reflect on an awful job that, in many ways, will never really be done: I still have scanned photos to organize and incorporate into the collection, there are videos to figure out, and I’m sure I’ll come across more phone backups and other photos and files as I start cleaning up the NAS.

But that’s for another day. Today, I’m going to briefly look at what I accomplished.

As I write this, the consolidated photo collection is comprised of over 138,400 files and takes up 452 GB on disk.

Looking at the collection decade by decade, there are over 600 photos from the 1970s, over 5100 from the 1980s, over 5800 from the 1990s, almost 27,000 from the 2000s, and over 55,000 from the 2010s. This isn’t on the chart, but there are over 44,000 photos in the collection from 2021 through January 2024, so it looks like the growth is going to continue. (Though I’d imagine it slows with the kids out of the house.)

Looking at the collection by year, there are some trends, the most obvious being the massive growth in photo volume over time.

The first notable bump was in 1985, when the number of photos taken year-over-year (YOY) doubled to 1092. That makes sense: I got my own SLR camera for Christmas in December 1984 and was off to the races.

1993 was another big bump, and that also makes sense: We moved to Arizona that year and visited Europe for the second time, and Paris and Ireland for the first time, so there were many new experiences to record.

But the massive growth starts in 2000 when I got my first digital camera. In 2003, we visited Europe for the first time in 10 years, kicking off nearly 20 years of trips there, often multiple times per year, first with a variety of digital cameras and then, of course, with smartphones. Then I switched from standalone cameras to smartphones for good, thanks to the Nokia Lumia 1030 in July 2013.

There are obviously up years and down years from a photo-taking perspective, but the dip in 2020 stands out. That, too, makes sense: That was the pandemic year, and aside from a belated drive to North Carolina to bring Kelly to college, we didn’t travel at all that year after February.

But with vaccinations arriving in early 2021, we made our first flight in 16 months that June, on the way to Mexico City for the first time. And because we bought an apartment there in 2022 and flew there several times before and after the purchase, 2022 was our peak year for photos: We somehow took over 14,000 photos and over 400 videos that year.

And that’s just what I saved. Consolidating what used to be three photo collections (plus dozens of smartphone backups) into a single collection was an excellent opportunity to do something I’ve wanted to do for years, and delete most of the device photos and screenshots I’ve taken over the course of 25 years of reviewing laptops, phones, and other hardware. I did of course save some of that, some of which I’ve moved into my work documents archive. But there’s no way to know how many tens of thousands of photos (or more?) there were.

Looking back, I can see that I resolved to undergo a massive physical and digital decluttering campaign in May 2023, but didn’t start on the first projects until August, when I tackled what I then thought would be the final scans. I thought I finished that work in September but that was not the case, and that mistake was just part of a series of issues that brought 2023’s decluttering work to a temporary halt. So I stripped down my goals to make them more achievable and started work on the project I’m now winding down in October.

That was 109 days ago.

And it’s not like I wasn’t busy doing other things. I also needed time to figure out the best ways to automate this process, given the daunting sizes of each collection I then had and all the duplicates. And let’s not forget that Google threw a wrench into my plans, and the schedule, when it changed how it handles per-use storage upgrades in Google Workspace. But whatever. The work isn’t going to complete itself, and I bet I worked on this project an hour or two almost every single day for the past month and a half or so.

I used several tools to help me automate this process, but a few—AllDup, Bulk Rename Utility, and MediaSorter—stand out in my mind, in part because I used them so much and was very pleased with the results, and recommend each highly. It is perhaps notable that each of these tools is free, though I did pay for several tools during this process as well.

These three tools also helped me get over one of the final hurdles: Finding the scanned photos and other files in the collection that didn’t have correct (or any) “Date taken” meta-data so I could fix them once and for all. But in the end, I still did a lot of manual work, comparing folders of files side-by-side to ensure that the consolidated collection was correct and complete.

I should rest, but my mind is racing with related tasks that might make sense.

File conversion is one:  I’ve considered converting all the PNG files in there to JPG to save space (and is there a way to do it that retains the meta-data)? Maybe convert the HEIC files to JPG as well (which would increase the storage used for those files)?

I wonder about pulling out the video files that are scattered throughout the collection and copying/moving them into our Home videos collection, which also needs a bit of organization and attention now that this photos work is complete.

I also have those remaining scans to think about. There’s a folder of partially organized “final scans” from 2023 sitting there waiting for me to complete, and looking at it now, I can see that there are over 1500unorganized/untagged files in there, and that I only organized and tagged a bit over 300. But it’s not just that: In my home office, I have a few boxes of paper and other physical items that need to be scanned and then thrown out when possible. But that project will have to wait until we get back from Mexico in early March (we leave next weekend).

It’s time to revisit and revise my to-do list, I guess. I will start with that.