Digital Decluttering: Photo Collection Successes and Defeats (Premium)

After I finally ran into a wall---really, multiple walls---with this year's digital decluttering efforts, I scaled back my short-term goals and recalibrated. And I created a set of to-do lists so that I could keep track of what I needed to complete before I could move on to further decluttering projects. There were four to-do lists, each with specific goals:

Photo collection. Consolidate my OneDrive- and Google Photos-based photo collections.
Photo and document scans. Organize and archive the remaining 2023 photo and document scans.
YouTube. Clean up and organize the Thurrott.com YouTube channel and upload and publish all (300+) of my archived videos there.
Move my documents and pictures to new locations so Folder Backup doesn't clutter up my documents archive and photo collection.

I made good progress on some of these to-do items.

As I documented in Following My Own OneDrive Advice (Premium), I ended up moving all of my OneDrive-based content into a new "Paul" folder in the root of OneDrive, with Apps, Documents, Music, Photos, and Videos sub-folders that are beyond the reach of Folder Backup. I was surprised by how well this worked and how easy it was.

I also completed my updating of the Thurrott.com YouTube channel, which included fixing and updating the branding; creating numerous playlists, including one for First Ring Daily; uploading, organizing, creating titles and descriptions for, and then publishing the over 300 videos in my personal archive, and many other basic cleanup and maintenance tasks.

I made some progress on the remaining 2023 photo and document scans, with over 300 photos (JPEGs) and documents (PDFs) correctly tagged with date-based meta-data, organized, and archived in multiple locations. But there is still a daunting amount of work to do here, with over 1500 files left to sort through and fix. I had hoped to finish this one before we went to Mexico, but I didn't and then barely looked at it while we were there because I was focused on updating the Windows 11 Field Guide and my normal day-to-day work. (Those efforts were both successful, at least.)

And I worked a lot on the photo collection consolidation---before, during, and since the Mexico trip---and even wrote a lot about what I had done, though I never published anything about this because I ultimately didn't solve the problem. But it's possible that some of you will find this information interesting, if only as a peek at the way my brain works, both good and bad. More to the point, all of this work and some recent successes suggest that I may, in fact, solve this problem. So you can find that below.

Before getting to that, there is a related drama hanging over my head: As I wrote Friday in Digital Decluttering: Online Accounts, Again (Premium), Google threw a wrench into my already-scrambled plans by discontinuing the ability to buy “individual storage subscriptions” for Google Workspace accounts, which I had been using and re...