Ask Paul: March 21 (Premium)

Happy Friday! And happy first day of Spring, which I feel compelled to mention I've been enjoying since mid-January when we arrived in Mexico City. But no matter. We're all on the same train now, so let's kick off the weekend, and Spring, with another great set of reader questions.
? Digital decluttering detox
AnOldAmigaUser asks:

Not to bring back a PTSD flashback, but when you were doing your digital decluttering, did you fix the date taken for scanned photos or did you just file them in year-month-day(?) folders. I did go back and read through the articles, but may have missed that.

Yes. That, to me, is the minimum: Each photo has to have some "Date taken" meta-data value. Nothing is ever 100 percent perfect, and as you move the photos from place to place (different services, but sometimes even just different drives or PCs), some things get lost. For that reason, I also store photos hierarchically, at least where I can, and certainly in the "master" copy. (Which I realize is not a great term these days, but I can't think of a better way to say it that succinctly.)

We have begun decluttering the room of mysteries in the basement and it appears that I have a lot of scanning to do. Luckily, a lot of the photos are pristine so I have that going for me. Only tool I have found to change date taken is exiftool. We also have a batch of VHS and Hi-8 home videos that I will need to do, and at least 15 carousels of slides, so a busy time.

The way my brain works is that when I am doing this type of work, I get really good at it and can optimize it so that it goes as quickly/efficiently as possible. But then when I'm done, it's out of my brain. So I have to go back and, in this case, re-read what I wrote to remind myself what it is that I did. The photo decluttering stuff was difficult and there was a lot to do, and so it happened in spurts over the years and then finally all came together. Now, it's kind of in maintenance mode: Most of it is "done," but there are still some scanned images in folders I have to finish up. And each year, I will be taking the previous year's photos and applying the consolidation and organization work I had done previously to them to make it consistent/clean or whatever.

I think the article Digital Decluttering: Tagging, Deduping, and Replicating the Photo Collection (Premium) is the most pertinent here. But the short version is that I found a few tools useful for this process--which is about renaming and organizing photo files and then dealing with those without "Date taken" meta-data--but eventually settled on Bulk Rename Utility (BRU) for deduplicating and consolidating, and then just used File Explorer for the meta-data. This was most problematic for the oldest photos--pre-digital photo scans--but now that I'm just cleaning up new photos, this is not a big issue anymore.

Regarding videos, I did do that work as well. Most of my home videos (pre-smartphones) are fairly low quality, but I did...