Digital Decluttering: Photo Collection Consolidated Through 2012 (Premium)

In late November, I discussed my new strategy for consolidating my three photo collections into a single archive that I would then replicate to multiple locations. This past Saturday, a bit over two weeks later, I finally finished the first phase of that work by completely consolidating all of the photos we've taken through 2012 into a single archive.

I probably could have finished this first phase a bit earlier. But as I wrote in the previous update in this series, I was interrupted by a ridiculous issue with Google Workspace and its inept support team. As a result, I spent an entire weekend two weeks ago moving my documents archive and Google Photos-based photo collection out of Google Workspace and into my personal Gmail account. But with that work completed, I was able to turn my attention back to the photo collection consolidation project. I don't believe a single day passed since then when I didn't spend at least an hour on this.

And while there is still a lot to do---there are more photos from 2013 through 2023 than all of the earlier years combined---this is still a big milestone for me. I'm not sure how long it will take, but I am sure that I finish this work in time. How much time? Let's check back in a month or so. We'll see.

But in the meantime, I figured it was time for a brief break. During which I can explain how the work went, how I did it, and how the automation tools that put this process over the top will only become more and more important as I move to consolidate the photos taken in the more recent years into that one complete photo collection.

As you may recall, I started with three photo collections, one in Google Photos and two in OneDrive, with the latter being a barely organized Camera roll folder that Microsoft created for smartphone backups and a very organized Photo collection folder that I had created. So the first thing I did was find a laptop with enough storage to contain all of them at once. And then I extracted a Google Takeout download of the Google Photos collection to its desktop and synced OneDrive's Camera roll and Photo collection folders locally.

Then, I worked to consolidate those three collections down to just two collections (through 2012) by organizing Camera roll and then integrating its contents into Photo collection. And then I began working to integrate the photos from Google Photos, year-by-year, into Photo collection too. Most of this work is what I'd call semi-automated. That is, I did adopt two free tools, Bulk Rename Utility (BRU) and AllDup, very early on to help automate this work as much as possible. But I also did a lot of manual work by snapping two folders side-by-side, Google Photos on the left and Photo collection on the right, so that I could compare their contents and act accordingly.

The goal was always the same: To empty the Google Photos folder (whichever year I was working on at the time) one way or the other. That is, in some cases, I needed to move pho...