Digital Decluttering: Some Photo Progress, and a Shift to Documents (Premium)

Two weeks ago, I started the time-consuming process of organizing, tagging, and archiving over 21 GB of scanned photos as part of a new digital decluttering initiative. Today, I am happy to report that I've concluded that work, and less happy to report that I still have a lot more work to do. So I will shift gears a bit and move into a new phase of this process related to similarly organizing and archiving my documents and other files. This one, alas, is a challenge of a different kind because there is so much more of it.

As noted in Digital Decluttering: Finishing the Job (Premium) and/or Digital Decluttering: Back in the Saddle Again (Premium), I have several buckets of physical and digital clutter that I would like to make progress on this year. (It's unreasonable to think that I can get through all of this in 2023, but I will try with the understanding that my energies get divided over time and that I should do as much as possible when I'm so inspired.) They are:

Electronics and other physical items. We moved from a very large house to a very small apartment this past year and did a lot of downsizing, but there is more work to be done. In particular, I have a lot of aging electronics to deal with still, many of which are just stacked up in the corner of our dining room right now. This is something I'm working on with my wife.

Paper-based photos and other documents. 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. I will sort through these and scan the items I want to keep digitally using a flatbed scanner. Originally, I thought that I'd do this work first, but I ended up going through my unsorted digital photos and scans instead.

Document archive. My (mostly work-related) documents archive is stored in OneDrive, and while much of it is nicely organized (more on this below), there are lots of unsorted documents and folders in there and I want to do a pass at removing unnecessary items and duplicates, and at truly organizing it once and for all, because cloud storage is a finite resource that I pay for. Tied to this, I have a copy of much of this (the archive parts, basically) on my NAS, which had been offline since the move, until yesterday. Again, more on this below.

Photo collection. My (by which I mean my wife and I's, or perhaps my family's) photo collection is stored in OneDrive, where it is mostly organized in date-based folders (especially the pre-smartphone stuff), in Google Photos (which I consider my primary collection), and on the NAS. I'm mostly OK with this system, but the work I just completed (more on this below) was to collect all of the unsorted photos and scans in OneDrive, take them offline, sort through them, organize and tag them, put them where they belong in OneDrive (in whatever date-based folders), and then archive them to Google Photos as well.

NAS. So I have this NAS. It's been offli...