All those photos and videos in the cloud eat up energy and thus contribute to global warming. As a content creator, I had quite a bit of digital mess in the cloud. My data shame is huge. And so I decided to take help from a photo organizer to get my digital photo and video archive in order together. With these tips, you can make work of this gigantic tidying job today.
Cleaning up your digital photo and video archive
We cannot imagine life without it, yet it is good to know that our internet consumption is incredibly taxing on our planet. Every time you stream a series, visit a website, send an innocent app or save a photo to the cloud, you are using data. And processing and storing data takes a lot of energy. And water, because cooling data centres in turn requires a lot of water. No clean business, then...
While I can no longer imagine life without the internet, social media and those fine streaming services, I do want to do something about my data consumption. Clearing out my digital archive is a simple first step that will do yourself and the planet a big favour. Tell me, a tidy photo cloud containing only the important memories that are also easy to find, who wouldn't want that? And so I set to work. With the help of photo organizer Danielle Regout of Personal OPA. Together with her, I dared to tackle this gigantic tidying job. She taught me how to clean up your digital photo and video archive efficiently and how to keep it tidy in the future.
Tips to clean up your digital photo and video archive
These days, it is incredibly easy to take pictures with your phone and capture everything. But it also leads to an overflowing film roll on your phone with simply too many photos, movies, screenshots, bursts, gifs, and so on. So how do you tackle that? Because all that data storage is anything but sustainable, it's often not free and very user-friendly either. In short, help yourself and the earth and clean up that digital mess!
Make cleaning up your photo and video archive a manageable project and here's how you do it!
Getting your photo and video cloud in order is a big job. To keep it manageable, it's smart to divide it into mini-projects. Small steps, small goals and that's how you slowly get to the finish line. Danielle has a golden tip: she recommends dividing tidying up. Do one each day. ‘Suppose today is 19 June. Then go to your photo cloud on your phone or desktop and go to the search bar/search function. Type in today's date. For example, ‘19 June’. Then you will see all the photos from 19 June through the different years (i.e. 19 June 2022, 19 June 2021, 19 June 2020, etc.). Then take a moment to walk through these photos and delete anything you no longer need. For me, this works really well because it gives me a defined project with a clear end goal: I only need to look at and clean up so many photos. If you keep this up for 365 (or 366) days, your entire film roll will be cleaned up and sorted out in a year's time.’
Important: check this before you get started!
on many phones, you have both a local gallery of photos and videos and an app from a cloud service. Before getting started with this mega job, check how photos are permanently deleted. You may find that you really need to delete the photos from the cloud and not from the gallery. (If you then delete it from the local gallery, it will still remain in the cloud. So in short, it's not deleted then). Terrible if you only find this out after deleting tens of thousands of photos. Then you can start all over again. So check carefully how it works for your phone before you start banging away at this project.
Mastering screenshots
We take screenshots all the time and Danielle comes across them in multiples in her clients' archives. Inspiring images of an interior, clothes, travel tips, special quotes, recipes, discount codes or tips from others that seem useful: it all ends up in your film roll and possibly in your cloud, while you only need most screenshots for a short time. Unnecessary and a bit of a waste of all the data storage to keep this for so long. And you don't have to, because there is a very quick way to get rid of it!
Danielle: ‘Most phones make it very easy for you: when you take a screenshot, it not only ends up in your movie roll, but it automatically ends up in a ‘smart album’ of your phone. In this case, the ‘Screenshots’ or ‘Screenshots’ album. So this album contains ALL the screenshots you take with your phone, everything is already together. All you have to do - and my advice would be to do this about every three months - is scroll through that folder and delete everything you no longer need. And the best part is: when you delete it from that folder, the screenshot also disappears from your film roll and is no longer on your phone!’
PRO-tip from Danielle: ‘Your phone also creates smart albums of your selfies, your videos, your bursts, timelapse, etc. Apply the above steps to those albums too and clear your film roll even faster.’
As you store more and more photos and videos in the cloud, data centres have to work harder and harder.
First aid for WhatsApp photos
I believe I know hardly anyone who does not struggle with photos in WhatsApp - what to do with them and how to save them? A note in advance: Whatsapp is a data worrier anyway. If you have everything set to automatic backup, your phone automatically backs up your entire WhatsApp and stores it in the cloud - it takes up a lot of memory and storage.
To keep this as low as possible, Danielle has two tips:
Tip 1: ‘Go to WhatsApp settings > then to ‘Chats’ > make sure ‘Add to film roll’ is off. (On an Android phone, it's called ‘media visibility’. By ticking this, you automatically save ALL photos from Whatsapp in your film roll. So also all those nonsense apps, jokes, gifs and videos that are constantly being sent. A super waste of the memory on your phone and of the energy required for data storage.’
Tip 2: ‘Make it a habit for yourself to delete one chat in Whatsapp every weekend. Scroll all the way down in your WhatsApp, to the very oldest chats, and go through them. Chances are very good that you're going to come across plenty of chats that you no longer do anything with and don't need (think group chats for an event, a baby shower, a birthday, a wedding, a weekend away, etc.). You can immediately go through the photos in that chat and save the very best ones to your film roll.’
PRO tip from Danielle: ‘Can't decide between the photos you want to keep or not? Or is it too much and too hard to go through? Then you can backup WhatsApp on your computer*, download ALL the photos from whatsapp so you can go through them quietly later and delete the chats from your phone with peace of mind.’
*For iPhone use the program imazing (€29.99)
*For Android, you link the phone to your computer and let it load, then there is a separate folder of whatsapp where you can get everything from.
A personal photo organiser to tidy up your photo and video archive?
With these tips from Danielle, you have everything you need to master your digital photo and video archive. Fewer pictures in the cloud means less environmental impact. If, after reading this article, you would also like to get started, but are not quite there yourself? With her company Personal OPA, Danielle has 11 years of experience as a tidying coach and has archived hundreds of archives. She teaches online courses, writes e-guides to get you started or is happy to get started with your photo archive herself. Want to start doing it yourself? Then her latest guide is a tip!
E-book: the complete guide to your mobile phone
Everything Danielle learned in those 11 years, she has now compiled in an e-book: The complete guide to your mobile phone. Handy: she has written a version for iPhone and for Android. This guide gives you everything you need to get started with your digital photo and video archive. The e-book has 40 pages and answers questions such as how to quickly delete photos and archive them logically in folders so you can find them quickly and how to keep them tidy. It is for sale in the Personal Opa webshop. With the code GREENLIST35 get 35% discount and you don't pay 37 euros, but EUR 24.05 for this guide.
About Danielle Regout
Danielle Regout is a professional photo organiser. She teaches courses, writes e-books and helps you one-on-one to create order in your digital photo and video archive.
More sustainable tips from thegreenlist.nl
- Also see: clean up your mailbox in 30 minutes!
- Also see: what is the impact of your smartphone?
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Sources: rtlnews.nl. Photo credits: Los Muertos (main image), Plann (Pexels), Sergei Starostin (Pexels), photo Danielle: Marilyn Bartman.
