How I Cleaned Up the Thousands of Photos and Videos I Had Scattered All Over the Internet

My media situation was a disaster. After decades of taking photos and videos, I had content in five clouds: Google, Apple, Flickr, Dropbox, OneDrive, as well as offline locations like USB sticks, jump drives, hard drives…

I’m not a professional photographer, just a guy who has taken his fair share of photos and videos over the years. You know how it is. You’re on a road trip, you take a bunch of nature photos, but after a few years they don’t look as amazing as they do from the car. Or my cats. Why did I take so many photos of them sleeping? Cats are cute, we get it, but did I need tons of photos to prove it?

Another problem was that I was using phones with different operating systems – Blackberry, Samsung, Motorola (Android), Nokia (Windows) and now iPhone (iOS) – and different backup systems. I was going against the norm; the vast majority of people don’t deviate from just one type of operating system.

It was like throwing things into a garage or closet. It’s getting more and more complicated. You tell yourself that one day you will clean, but that day never comes.

And this excessive procrastination comes at a price. The more cloud storage locations you have, the more you pay, and as the megabytes and gigabytes pile up, you often have to pay more each month for higher storage limits.

It was time to vacuum it up and clean it. After consulting various recommendations on how to proceed, I came up with my plan. My steps would be: gather, declutter and consolidate.

Bring it all together

First, I identified the cloud storage platforms where I had photos and videos. Then I located the photos and videos I had on various jump drives, flash drives, SSD and hard drives. I even reactivated a few old desktops and laptops to see if I had anything there. I then downloaded the media from the external drives to my laptop.

My situation was a little confusing. It’s much easier for people whose media content is stored in just one or two cloud services.

Learn more: From Photo Backups to My Own Cloud Server: My Journey to Home Data Storage

Then I moved on to decluttering, which is probably the longest and most exhausting step. I went through each of my cloud storage accounts and weeded out blurry or low-quality, duplicate or redundant photos, as well as photos that — now, years later — I don’t even remember why I took them in the first place.

Duplicates are a major problem. This can happen for several reasons. If you automatically backup from different devices (e.g. iPhone, tablet, and digital camera), the same photo could literally be backed up three times. Or, you may save a photo that is shared with you on WhatsApp, but that photo is already synced to your cloud storage.

There are at least several ways to remove duplicates. There are services that scan your cloud storage and locate them, as well as services that can scan your photos and videos after you download them to your hard drive.

Cloud Duplicate Finder ($40 for 3 months, $70 for 1 year, $96 for 2 years) scans multiple cloud storage services (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, Amazon S3) simultaneously for duplicates. DeDuplicate can do the same thing with Google, OneDrive, Dropbox and others (not iCloud). It costs $8 on the App Store.

Google also has a built-in tool that can search for and remove blurry photos and screenshots; It’s in the Manage Storage section.

You can also remove duplicates by syncing your Google cloud, OneDrive and Dropbox with your local desktop, then using Duplicate Photo Cleaner to find duplicates. The app can analyze synced photos and look for duplicates as well as versions that have been edited, cropped or resized. You can then delete them and sync the changes to the cloud, removing duplicates.

The free version of the CCleaner app can scan your photo library and find duplicate identical images, but not simply similar or modified images. The premium version of CCleaner ($90 per year) may find images that are blurry, poorly lit, or of poor quality.

There are also free duplicate finder tools. DupeGuru searches for duplicates and similar photos on Windows, Mac and Linux. Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder is a Windows program that identifies duplicates and photos that have been cropped or saved with color filters. Remo Duplicate Photos Remover can scan iPhone and Android camera rolls for exact matches and similar images, such as those taken in burst mode.

I also went through all my videos and deleted the ones I no longer wanted or needed. This is the key: On an iPhone, the size of a 30-second video can range from 40 MB (standard HD) to over 200 MB (4K resolution), compared to 2 to 5 MB for a typical photo. Shrinking videos can significantly reduce your cloud storage burden.

You can also decide not to declutter if you don’t have time or want to do it later, after you have all your photos in one place.

Use the 3-2-1 backup rule

After deleting all the unwanted photos and videos, I decided to use Google Photos as my primary cloud storage location. I use Google a lot for document creation, and it’s easy to backup from my iPhone, so it seems like a natural cloud solution.

Apple allows Google to transfer copies of photos and videos from its servers to Google’s servers. But to transfer media from OneDrive, Dropbox, Flickr, and external drives, I had to download copies to my hard drive and then upload them to Google.

If you only use iPhones and iPads for your media creation, you can simply use Apple’s iCloud for your storage needs.

Prices differ for each of the major cloud services. Apple charges $1 per month for 50 GB, $3 for 200 GB, and $10 for 2 TB. Google charges $2 for 100 GB, $3 for 200 GB, and $10 for 2 TB. Microsoft’s OneDrive bundles cloud storage with Office apps from Microsoft 365, resulting in a $10 per month fee for 1 TB of storage.

Amazon Prime members get unlimited photo storage and 5GB for videos and documents. If you need more storage for videos, you can pay $2 for 100GB and $7 per month for 1TB.

Whichever solution you choose, understand the 3-2-1 backup rule: 3 copies of all data; 2 copies to 2 different storage media, such as a cloud service and a local disk; And 1 example located a few kilometers from the others.

Basically, it’s a way to make sure you don’t lose all your precious photos and videos by relying on just one location for your data.

I opted for one of the most common strategies to implement the 3-2-1 backup rule. I downloaded all my photos and videos to my computer (#1), then backed it all up to an external hard drive (#2), and finally backed it all up to Google’s cloud (#3). 3-2-1 achieved!

However, this is not a one-off solution. If you go this route, you’ll need to regularly update your local and external drives with your latest photos and videos. For example, if you add, say, 200 photos to the Google cloud, you will need to upload them to your local and external storage locations in order to maintain three copies of all the data.

If you don’t already have an external hard drive, CNET has one a multitude of recommended for various storage needs.

Great to do it

Even though it took me quite a while to organize my multimedia, it was a great feeling to finally be able to do it. It inspired me to create a few paper photo books and digital frames, and it was nice to be more intentional about all the photos and videos I took instead of just throwing them into a digital shoebox.

I also reduced my subscription fees. Before I started slash and burn on my multimedia, I was paying almost $300 a year for storage in four cloud systems for almost 400 GB, which, compared to many others, isn’t a lot of data. In any case, I reduced this amount enough to meet Google’s 400GB storage plan, which costs $3 per month for three months, then $5 per month after that.

My annual subscription fee went from almost $300 to less than $60.

Now if I can just get to that storage closet…