Sometimes I feel the itch to clean up certain aspects of my life. I’m not a die-hard purist or minimalist, but this itch has become unbearable over the past few months, so I decided to do something about it. There is no better time to do so than at the beginning of a new year. So here is the list of things I want to tackle.

photos 🖼

My photo backup strategy prior to 2015 was rudimentary. I had a folder for each year with a subfolder for “significant” events and unsorted pictures. This was stored on the hard drive of my then Windows based laptop. As you might expect, that hard drive failed, rendering the pre-2005 photos inaccessible. Moving to a Mac in 2015 and subscribing to iCloud storage was a blessing in disguise, as this collection is one of my most valuable assets.

The library itself is more or less well organized. New shots are cherry-picked, so only the best ones are kept. The opposite is true for the old ones. There are a lot of almost identical, blurry and poor quality ones. Most of them have sentimental value. This is a curated collection, so the bad ones have to go. Currently, the library has 17,172 photos and 2,215 videos with a total size of 156.5 GB. It will be a hell of an exercise to weed them out.

To add insult to injury, I decided to add location data to the pre-iPhone era pictures. Of the 17 thousand above, 3,753 do not have GPS data, and 401 of the 22 hundred are also missing it. Fortunately, I have HashPhotos to the rescue, and I scheduled this exercise for the bi-weekly commute to work. I’ll report back on how it went, but it won’t be anytime soon.

files, apps & services 💾

Oddly enough, the external hard drive I had been using for the past few years died on me after I moved to my new computer. So documents and miscellaneous files live on my laptop or some cloud storage, which is far from optimal. This is an opportunity to consolidate this data and move as much as possible to an offline repository. It will have a better structure and take up less space. At the same time, I will achieve the goal of getting my stuff off privacy-invading services.

After the cleanup, I need to develop a better backup strategy and rethink the choice of applications I use. As a FOSS enthusiast, I will do my best to find a viable open source alternative to the software I currently use. I will also rethink my options in cases where open source is not an option. The goal is to use more privacy-respecting and self-sovereign tools without hidden fees. Maybe in a future post I will go through my stack once it is stabilized.

I checked the number of entries in my password manager. The number is too damn high considering how many web services I use regularly. Most of them are just simple registrations for services I was curious about, while the other half are replaceable or duplicates. If I gain traction with the above cleaning projects, it is safe to say that I can weed out this particular part of my digital life.

Maybe all of the above is a huge pile, but I still plan to cut it down in Q1.