Digital Decluttering: 2024 Reset (Premium)

I accomplished a lot in last year’s big digital decluttering push, most notably the photo collection consolidation. But it’s time to fire up the decluttering engine again. I have big plans for 2024 too.

Granted, much of this is work that I had originally hoped to finish last year. And work I expected to at least make some progress on during our recent trip to Mexico City. But life gets in the way, and while I did get a lot of work done over the past five weeks, none of it was related to decluttering. Indeed, I was constantly reminded that one of my goals related to account decluttering is most likely impossible.

We’ll get to that. But I’ve organized what I wish to accomplish in 2024 in a particular order in Notion, so I’ll start at the top with a perennial favorite, photos.

Photos

With my photo collections finally consolidated into a single collection that’s cleaned up from a meta-data perspective and nicely organized and replicated across multiple locations, I will finally go back and finish the paper scans work I started last September. This involves two pieces, both onerous. There’s the so-called “Final scans” folder of photos and documents that I already scanned but need to clean up, organize, and duplicate to all the versions of the photo collection, and then a closet’s worth of further paper-based photos and other items that still need to be scanned.

I’ll do those in order. The “Final scans” bit is at least partially done: Of the 1,869 files in there, I’ve cleaned up and organized over 300 of them, so I have over 1,500 I have to figure out. And the closet, well. We’ll see. When we moved from our previous apartment into our current condo in late 2023, there was more left to do than I’d hoped, but this kind of work is at least well-understood and technically easy. It’s just a matter of doing it.

But that will be the end of it. Longer term, I’ll just have some might maintenance to do, maybe once a year, to make sure that the photos from each passing year are correctly filed away in each version of the collection. But most of that is automated, so I should never run into the issue that led to last year’s consolidation push again. That’s good news.

Home videos

As with the “Final scans” folder, I had brought a copy of our home videos folder to Mexico, figuring that the mood would strike. But it did not, so I will turn to that after the photos work noted above is done. I had done some work on home videos last year, primarily by re-digitizing several DV tapes worth of home movies, including at least one I had never digitized and don’t remember, which was nice. I then uploaded the resulting videos to a private YouTube channel for the family.

But there’s more to do. In addition to the DV tapes I did re-digitize, there are some 8mm tapes that I’ll probably have (re)digitized using some service, since I don’t have a compatible player or camera anymore. And we have a messy pair of home video archives in OneDrive and on the NAS that need to be cleaned up and consolidated. I may pull videos of some length (over a minute>) out of the photo collection(s) and add them to this new home movies archive. And then get everything replicated and uploaded to YouTube as well.

Online accounts

This one is a problem.

Last year, I intended to finally undertake the horrible task of consolidating my many online accounts down to just a few core accounts, separating my personal accounts from my work accounts. But this failed for the same reasons it always fails, this is hard if not impossible for all kinds of reasons. And then Google threw me a curveball when it suddenly changed the way that handles extra storage for Workspace accounts, triggering an emergency reshuffling in which I ended up adding 2 TB of additional storage to my personal Gmail account through Google One and moving to that for photos.

This ended up working out fine, but it set me back by weeks, if not a month. And since then, I’ve been dealing with the weird reality of having two main Google accounts in which my usage is split unevenly.

This is a bit difficult to explain, but my Workspace account, which I consider my primary online identity—[email protected]—is the default for much of what I do, and in addition to work-related things, it’s the account that’s associated with my YouTube Music and YouTube accounts plus numerous other online accounts. YouTube Music is particularly problematic given the dozens of playlists full of thousands of songs I have, and all of my efforts to copy them to other services, or just to the YouTube Music associated with my Gmail account, have failed horribly.

But my personal Gmail account now holds one version of the consolidated photo collection and, oddly, my current work files for the site stuff and the books (because that’s where I have the most storage). This mix is, at best, off. But it’s not just that. It’s that the wrong services come up when I open browser tabs. For example, while I can have both accounts signed in to Brave or whatever browser, if [email protected] is the first/default account, that’s good for Gmail, Calendar, and YouTube, but not so good for Photos. And if Gmail is the first/default account, the reverse is true. It gets frustrating.

There are workarounds like using different browsers for different accounts, but that gets complicated. And I find myself continually signing in to online services using the wrong account. Just keeping track of everything is difficult.

Anyway, this is the one area that may not be fully solvable. But I have several to-dos listed under the online services umbrella, and if I can make some progress across any of these, it may eventually lead to the consolidation I need.

But first things first. I’ve got passwords to clean up still, though I have started that work and have made progress (in Dashlane). I am currently consolidating my several email accounts through my Workspace account, and will experiment to see whether doing so with Gmail instead will solve any problems (or just introduce new ones). I will keep experimenting with third-party music service playlist migration tools, though none have ever worked. And a few other things. I need to move slowly on this one.

Steph

I’ve been meaning to go over my wife’s setup for months now, and had expected to do this in Mexico, but we never found the time. When I did my account security work in late 2023, I made sure her accounts were secure as well. But I want to check out how she works and ensure it’s as efficient as possible, as she pushes everything through OneDrive.

I was reminded of this need the morning after we got back from Mexico when she asked if I could help her get connected to the external desktop display she uses here. This quickly escalated from what I assumed would be a simple two-minute troubleshooting issue into an hour-long slog in which I fully updated her PC (via Windows Update and HP Support Assistant) and was surprised to discover how much there was, including two firmware updates, and then replaced her aging USB-A dock with the same Anker 555 8-in-1 USB-C hub she uses in Mexico (which means I’ll now need to buy a third one). In the end, I of course got it to work, but it took a lot longer than I’d expected.

So we’ll go over her workflow soon. But I wish she’d keep her PC up to date. She seems uninterested in this.

NAS

I’ve been meaning to get a new NAS for several months now, and I’m surer than ever that I’ll need to get two, so I can bring one to Mexico and leave it there, syncing with the first one in a sort of personal cloud setup. This will most likely be a 2-bay Synology NAS of some kind, ideally with enough horsepower to handle Plex and on-the-fly video transcoding. But I’m open to other brands—UGREEN is on the verge of releasing its first NAS products, for example—and other configurations, and am still thinking through this. But my current NAS, an out of support and older WD MyCloud EX2, is slow it’s painful to use for most things. And this may come to a head sooner rather than later.

More to come

There’s probably more to come, but that’s more than enough for now, and hopefully I can get through all this in a reasonable time frame. I’ll keep you updated as anything interesting happens.