Digital Decluttering: Photo Consolidation Mission Accomplished (Premium)

I thought I was winding down major combat operations in my photo consolidation project in early January. At the time, I had consolidated all three of my overlapping photo collections into a single master collection, and thanks to my growing experience with various automation tools, I expected to finish that up quickly. At the time of my last update, on January 2nd, I conservatively noted only that it would conclude by the end of the month. But I knew it would happen much more quickly than that. I was doing great.

Until, of course, I wasn't.

Thanks to my ADHD-addled brain, which can reward or betray me depending on variables I will never understand, I had overlooked something important. And the successes I was having in early January---during which I was consolidating photos from 2013 and newer at a torrid pace---were, if not illusory, certainly not as impressive as I had thought.

Here's what happened.

For the first "half" of this consolidation project (photos through 2012), I first combined two of the three collections (from my OneDrive Camera roll and Photo collection folders) into a single OneDrive collection. And then I consolidated my third collection, from a Google Photos takeout download, into that, creating the final collection. I used a variety of automation tools to reduce the grunt work as much as possible, but the final step was to work manually year-by-year, day-by-day, comparing the photos side-by-side, with the Google collection on the left and the master OneDrive collection on the right. I would move or delete the Google files, folder by folder, until a year was complete and then move on to the next year. Day by day. Tedious, exacting work. But it was happening.

After doing that for several years' worth of photos, I just moved forward into the second "half" of the project (which was half only by folder count, but was much bigger in size than the first half). And as noted, that work went very quickly, and I was surprised by the progress. Within a few days, it was clear I was going to "finish" this project, at least in the sense that I'd then have a single photo collection of whatever size (I was guessing around 400 GB) that I could replicate in various online services and on my NAS. And going forward, as my wife and I automatically backed up all our phone photos to multiple places, I'd never have to worry too much about this again.

But then I discovered my mistake. In moving forward to those newer years (2013 and up), I had skipped a step. I had never consolidated the OneDrive Camera roll and Photo collection folders into a single OneDrive collection. And so I was just consolidating the Google collection into the OneDrive Photo collection folder. The OneDrive Camera roll folder, which by then contained only photos from 2013 and newer) had never been consolidated. That's why it had gone so quickly: I was only doing half the work.

What bothers me most here is that this never occurred to me naturally. Maybe ...