Digital Decluttering: The Annual Checkup Went Poorly ⭐️

A few years back I spent a considerable amount of time decluttering my photo collection. OK, that's a gross misrepresentation of the work, given the decades of photos I wanted to consolidate, how long it took, and how many times I failed before I finally figured out how to get it done. But whatever. What I was left with at the end was a clean and organized photo collection spanning 8 decades. And a small to-do item for every year of my life going forward.

Which I know sounds a bit odd. But this is specific to how I do things, including how I store and back up this collection. It's not something I recommend to others per se, but because I move between iPhones and Android smartphones and use various cloud storage services, it's even more complicated.

The good news? This annual to-do should be much, much easier and faster than the bulk consolidation I did a few years back. There are far fewer photos to deal with and just about all of them were taken with smartphones, so the metadata is good. I hope to automate this process as much as possible at some point, perhaps using some kind of an AI-based workflow. But for now, the process is anything but automated.
It's 2026, do you know where your photos are?
I used several different smartphones in 2025, including the Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max, the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus, the Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, Pixel 10 Pro XL, Pixel 10 Pro Fold, and the iPhone 17 Pro Max. Lucky me.

I also switched to a set of Synology NASes as the "source of truth" for all my data, personal and professional, in 2025, though not all at once. I got the first NAS, a two-bay DiskStation DS224, that May and then a four-bay DiskStation DS423+ in August, and once I got them syncing with each other, I brought the DS244 to Mexico in September. So they've been doing their thing since then, so to speak. For the purposes of this discussion, there are two things to know:

All the phones I use now back up photos to Synology using Synology Photos in addition to the other services noted below.
Those backups land on the NASes in a different location than my now-organized photo collection. That is, where my phone backups go to home\Photos\MobileBackup with subfolders for each device, my photo collection is in photo\Photo collection.

Obviously, I want to have a backup of this Photo collection in multiple places with some geographic diversity. But I also use the automatic phone backup feature in Google Drive and OneDrive on all phones and iCloud/Apple Photos on the iPhones only. For now, Google Photos and OneDrive should both have completely, hopefully identical collections of all the photos taken across all the phones I've used. But really, Google Photos is the most complete because my wife and I are using the service's Partner Sharing feature to sync her photos into that collection too. I suppose I could ask her to also use Synology Photos, but that's a debate/discussion for another day.

This is a...