My multimedia situation was a mess. After decades of taking photos and videos, I had stuff in five clouds — Google, Apple, Flickr, Dropbox, OneDrive — and also in offline locations like flash drives, jump drives, hard drives…
I’m not a professional photographer, just a guy who’s taken his 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 shots, but after a few years, they don’t seem as amazing as they did from the car. Or my cats. Why did I take so many shots of them sleeping? Cats are cute, we get it, but did I need tons of pics to prove it?
Another issue was that I’ve used 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 one type of OS.
It was like throwing stuff into a garage or storage closet. It gets messier and messier. You tell yourself one day you’ll clean it up, but that day never comes.
And that overstuffed procrastination comes with 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 suck it up and clean it up. After checking out various recommendations on how to go about it, I crafted my plan. My steps would be: gather, declutter and consolidate.
Gather it all up
First, I identified which cloud storage platforms I had photos and videos in. Then I located photos and videos I had on various jump drives, flash drives, SSDs and hard drives. I even revved up a couple of old desktops and laptops to see if I had anything there. I then uploaded the multimedia from external drives onto my laptop.
My situation was a bit of a jumble. It’s a lot easier for folks who have their multimedia stored in only one or two cloud services.
Read more: From Photo Backups to My Own Cloud Server: My Trip Into Home Data Storage
Then I moved on to decluttering, which is likely the most time-consuming and grueling step. I went into each of my cloud storage accounts and weeded out photos that were blurry or otherwise of bad quality, duplicates or redundant, and photos that — now, years later — I can’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 back up from different devices — perhaps an iPhone, tablet and digital camera — the same photo could literally be backed up three times. Or, it could be that you back up a photo that is shared with you on WhatsApp, but you already have that photo synced into your cloud storage.
There are at least a couple of ways to remove duplicates. There are services that scan your cloud storage and locate them, and services that can scan your photos and videos after you’ve downloaded them onto 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 to find 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 find blurry photos and screenshots and delete them; it’s in the Manage Storage section.
You can also remove duplicates by syncing your Google, OneDrive and Dropbox cloud to your local desktop, then using Duplicate Photo Cleaner to find duplicates. The app can scan the synced photos and find duplicates and also versions that have been edited, cropped or resized. You can then delete those and sync the changes back to the cloud, thereby removing dupes.
The CCleaner app’s free version can scan your photo library and find identical duplicate images, but not images that are merely similar or edited. CCleaner’s premium version ($90 per year) can find images that are blurry, have poor lighting or are otherwise of bad quality.
There are some free duplicate-finders too. DupeGuru scans 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 shot with burst mode.
I also went through all my videos and deleted those that I didn’t want or need anymore. This is key — on an iPhone, the size of a 30-second video can range from 40MB (standard HD) to more than 200MB (4K resolution), compared to 2-5MB for a typical photo. Reducing videos can greatly reduce your storage load in the cloud.
You could also decide to skip decluttering if you don’t have the time or want to do it later, after you’ve consolidated all your photos into one spot.
Use the 3-2-1 backup rule
After I weeded out all unwanted photos and videos, I decided to use Google Photos as my main cloud storage location. I use Google a lot for document creation, and it’s an easy backup from my iPhone, so it seems like a natural cloud solution.
Apple lets Google transfer photo and video copies from its servers to Google’s. But to transfer multimedia from OneDrive, Dropbox, Flickr and external drives, I needed to download copies onto my hard drive and then upload them to Google.
If you only use iPhones and iPads for your multimedia creation, you could just use Apple’s iCloud for your storage needs.
Prices differ for each of the major cloud services. Apple charges $1 per month for 50GB, $3 for 200GB and $10 for 2TB. Google charges $2 for 100GB, $3 for 200GB and $10 for 2TB. Microsoft’s OneDrive bundles the cloud storage with Microsoft 365’s Office apps, which results in a $10 per month charge for 1TB 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 way you go, understand the 3-2-1 backup rule: 3 copies of all data; 2 copies on 2 different storage media, such as a cloud service and a local drive; and 1 copy located a few miles away from the others.
Basically, it’s a way to ensure you don’t lose all your precious photos and videos by relying on only one location for your data.
I went with one of the most common strategies for implementing the 3-2-1 backup rule. I downloaded all of my photos and videos to my computer (No. 1), then backed all of that onto an external hard drive (No. 2), and finally backed up all of it to the Google cloud (No. 3). 3-2-1 achieved!
It’s not a one-time fix, however. If you go that route, you will 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’ll need to download those to your local and external storage locations so that you maintain three copies of all data.
If you don’t yet have an external hard drive, CNET has a slew of recommended ones for various storage needs.
Great to get it done
Even though it took a fair amount of time to organize my multimedia, it was a great feeling to finally get it done. It inspired me to create a few hard-copy photo books and digital frames, and it was nice to be more intentional about all the photos and videos I had taken instead of just chucking them into basically a digital shoebox.
I also reduced my subscription costs. Before going slash and burn on my multimedia, I was paying nearly $300 per year for storage in four cloud systems for nearly 400 GB, which, compared to a lot of others, is not that much data. In any case, I cut that amount enough to get within Google’s 400 GB storage plan, which costs $3 per month for three months and then $5 per month after that.
My yearly subscription costs went from nearly $300 to less than $60.
Now, if I can just get to that storage closet…
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