Electronic Photo Decluttering Project
Having time away from work and able to focus on my personal items, I’ve been in the over year long process of cleaning up my computer files, specifically photos. I had over 45,000 photos on my computer, but I knew from certain times in my life that they were duplicates or just photos I no longer needed to hang onto.
About a year ago, I set off to organize them by year and if possible then by month. I accomplished that over a year ago. I wanted to go through and also delete the crappy photos, blurry, not of much, photos of documents no longer needed, but then I ran into the issue if I deleted them in one place and had duplicates of them, now when I was getting rid of duplicates I’d still have remaining files of these crappy photos so it seemed too soon to do this.
This week after months of asking friends, how do I get rid of these duplicate files, I found 2 ways to get rid of them and I got rid of over 6,000 duplicate photos.
One way of doing this was using Window’s Powershell which would delete all duplicates which would have been fast and easy, however the drawback was that I couldn’t decide which folder those photos would stay in and since I had already organized them some, I wanted to decide which photos stayed. How to find and delete duplicate files on Windows | Trend Micro Help Center
Options two was using CCleaner which although tedious since I was deciding which locations I wanted to keep and had to select each individual file, it was quicker than me trying to find which files were duplicates as I had done previously to clear out thousands more duplicate photos.
Once you download CCleaner, the free version, you can go to tools and then duplicate finder. You can select the files you want to have it go through duplicates for. When in Add/Edit, you’ll likely want to, under options, select: “Include files and subfolders”. You can also exclude folders so for example if you have important documents subfolder or duplicate photos you’re aware of and don’t want to deal with initially. I ended up going year by year through my photos first to get rid of duplicates so the process was more broken up then I did it again, in case I had miscategorized which year some photos were taken.
CCleaner Makes Your Computer Faster & More Secure | Official Website



Now that my photos on my computer are much lighter, it’s time to continue my photo and electronic decluttering process. Ensuring that photos are backed up to the cloud. Heading over to my phone to try to duplicate the photos there that I’m also paying for storage on. Getting rid of the photos that no longer serve any value. And maybe one day being able to digitize the family photos that sit in boxes in my parent’s house. Seeing as there have been multiple flood in Florida that have decimated houses over the past year, getting some of those photos digitized sounds ideal.