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 pai...