Digital Decluttering: Back in the Saddle Again (Premium)

Back in May, I wrote about some of the decluttering work we did when we sold our house and moved into an apartment, and while I noted that there were lingering physical items to declutter, I omitted two important and onerous additional tasks I still need to perform as well. Both are related to digital decluttering.

This topic came up separately in the July 21 edition of Ask Paul (look for the “Digital hoarding” section), in which I discussed having over 250 GB of documents and photos in OneDrive that need to be triaged, organized, and/or, where possible, deleted. But OneDrive is only part of the problem: I also have files on my NAS, which is currently disconnected from the network, that I need to go through, organize, and push into the cloud where needed.

Where to start?

The two main buckets here—physical and digital clutter—are often intertwined, such as when I need to scan a photo or document and then organize and store it in the cloud. But neither is more important than the other, and both need to be addressed. And now that we’re home from Mexico City for a few months, the time feels right. And so I started by assessing what I need to deal with.

On the physical front, I have at least one bin in my storage shelf that is full of stray photos, documents, newspaper clippings, kids’ drawings, and more, just sitting there in a pile. These will need to be scanned using a flatbed scanner, and I kept an HP all-in-one printer that I’d otherwise not need for just this purpose. And so today I spent an inordinate amount of time just getting that printer, a three-year-old HP Envy Pro 6400, configured for our new (to it) wireless network and updated with the correct drivers. I won’t bore you with the details, but this process went slowly and failed several times before I finally got it up and running.

On the digital front, I have three main areas to investigate: my OneDrive-based documents (which is the biggest and perhaps messiest collection), my OneDrive-based photos (loose, unsorted scans mostly), and my NAS-based files, whatever they are. (I haven’t put this thing on the network since we moved.)

Long story short, I decided to start with the photos, because they are in many ways the most important and because this seemed like a good way to make some progress. These photos took up a total of 21.4 GB of space when I started the process, all stored within two folders inside of my “Photo collection” folder in OneDrive\Pictures.

First, I synced those two folders locally to a PC with a lot of storage so that I could work with them offline.

When that was done, I created a new folder in the root of my OneDrive Pictures folder called “_Master scans to sort.” And then I moved the contents of those two folders into that new folder. No good reason, I just wanted a single place for all the misfit photos and scans, and I wanted it out of my Photo collection folder.

With that done, I can go through the folders and images in what I think of as the source folder (“_Master scans to sort”) and then move them, as necessary, into the appropriate folders in the destination folder, “Photo collection.” This latter folder is organized into year subfolders (“2004,” “2005,” and so on) which contain event subfolders using a “YYYY-MM-DD Event name” naming format, like “2004-01-09 CES.” First, of course, I need to check the meta-data of each photo and make sure the right “Date taken” field is filled out. And then I also need to copy those photos into Google Photos, my primary photo source, before moving them within OneDrive to their final homes. (Google Photos and OneDrive are roughly identical and up-to-date with my photo collection.)

This may make more sense if I go through it step-by-step. So here’s a quick walkthrough of how I handle a folder full of photos that were scanned but not properly organized, in what is essentially a best-case scenario. First things first, I snap the “_Master scans to sort” folder (which is synced locally) and “Photo collection” folder (which is not) side-by-side for easy comparison and, when needed, drag-and-drop.

Then, I find a folder of photos to organize from the source folder: here, I’ve chosen a folder called “2006-12-29 Jared.” In the destination folder, I navigate into “2006” to see if this folder (and the photos it contains) are present. And as you can see, they are not.

Next up, I open up “2006-12-29 Jared” and see whether the (two) photos it contains have the correct “Date taken” meta-data: Select all, right-click, Properties, navigate to the Details tab. They do! This is why this example was best-case; there’s so little extra to do. Had this meta-data been wrong or empty, I would have filled it out. I’ve certainly had to do that for a lot of files, and that’s likely going to be true for most of the work I do here.

The next step is to upload them to Google Photos by dragging and dropping them into that service in a web browser window. Google Photos doesn’t care about folders or my folder structure, but you could also just drag a folder into the browser to get all the photos in it uploaded as well.

(Google Photos is also a handy if somewhat limited way to remind yourself to fix the meta-data: if you forget to add the “Data taken” meta-data and that field is empty, those photos will appear at the top of your photos feed. Oops.)

Then I move the folder from the source to the destination (“Photo collection\2006”)

And there you go: one folder down, with 254 folders and 3,456 files to go. Rinse, wash, repeat.

And yes, it will pretty much always be this tedious. Actually, sometimes it will be even worse: there are many photos that are not in any way organized or denoted with dates, multiple scans that need to be separated out of individual files, and all kinds of other problems to deal with. And I’ll be adding more as I scan in all that remaining detritus. This is why no one ever does this: it’s time-consuming and boring.

But it’s still worth doing.

I’ll check back when I’ve made some headway with the digital photos that need to be organized, or perhaps if I feel inspired to start scanning again. It has to happen eventually.