i’ve been pondering and wanting for a very long time to trim through my phone photos and try to keep it decluttered of random screenshots and stuff, but i dread pulling a full ‘wipe everything’ considering i take photos of memorable moments but don’t remember when/where those are
so i wanted to ask how you guys manage it? do you store in your PC? do you have a dedicated hard drive, the Cloud™? what gets trimmed and what gets kept for yall?
(hopefully this posting area is fine, it’s more just my curiosity to see how ppl organize + inspiration)
I am on 97% on my free tier with Google Drive and I still haven’t figured out what I am doing next.
I tried experimenting with Imgur a little while back for local storage, but found it too hard keeping the server up. I may have to figure it soon though
I don’t take that many photos and screenshots, but yeah. I download them to my PC and make backups, so it’s not a problem to free up phone storage when it proves necessary (though right now I have a spacious one). Keeping my file in folders also helps keep track of them somewhat. Wouldn’t be too hard to start deleting what doesn’t need keeping if it ever proves necessary.
I have a 8TB hard drive coming this weekend that I’m going to install on my main Linux machine (a secondhand Lenovo ThinkCentre M92P that I’ve dubbed “superbeast”. I’ll be putting my wife’s photos there since she’s gone full shutterbug and needs a place to store images before culling the bad shots.
If I was into photography and cared to do more to organize my screenshots, I think I’d have local HTML pages that list/display images. Something like what this blogger does:
I just whipped this up for playlists:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>~/Music/playlists</title>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<meta name="description" property="og:description" content="a local playlists page">
<meta name="generator" content="GNU Emacs 30.1 (build 1, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.24.48, cairo version 1.18.2)
of 2025-02-26, modified by Debian">
</head>
<body>
<header>
<h1>~/Music/playlists</h1>
</header>
<main>
<p>
Click a link to open it in a music player app.
Unfortunately, the HTML5 <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/audio"><code><audio></code></a> element doesn’t support M3U playlists as sources without JavaScript.
Then again, having the browser call a separate app to handle playlists <em>is</em> the UNIX way.
</p>
<section>
<h2>Heavy Metal</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="./ghost-skeleta.m3u">Ghost: <cite>Skeletà</cite> (2025)</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
<section>
<h2>Gothic Rock</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="./gene-loves-jezebel-heavenly-bodies.m3u">Gene Loves Jezebel: <cite>Heavenly Bodies</cite> (1993)</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</main>
</body>
</html>
I will never trust my stuff to anyone’s cloud, least of all one run by one of these pernicious corporations. My photos in particular are on my phone (going back to 2005, when I first got a camera phone), as well as on my laptop and desktop computers. I also run a regular backup to an external drive and an annual one to a drive that I keep in a safe in a different city. So at any given time there are five copies of the data (two of them not quite up to date). I synchronise using syncthing, P2P file synchronising utility.
Main thing is to prune regularly - I take plenty of pictures but I take a minute at the end of the day to weed out the bad ones. I have seen too many friends scroll by a dozen pictures of the same meal or cat or handwritten note - it adds up. I guess doing a massive manual cleanup of years worth of photos will take time, but it’s worth the effort of having a curated collection of pictures rather than the equivalent of an attic full of boxes of negatives. Do a big curation effort and keep trimming from then on.
At the moment, 20 years of phone photos amount to about 70GB, so I have plenty of space to spare. I think all these cloud companies offering “unlimited” (remember Google’s ‘infinity + 1’? me neither) storage have made us forget about keeping our filesystems and collections neat and tidy - we must relearn.
I actually use a Mavica to take digital photos, because I’m certain with those the photos are going to be optimised to fit on a floppy disk, which must mean they’re space efficient.
I still go for the highest res, which means I can only store 4 on a single disk, but 4 photos at 950KB is still pretty good!
As for analogue photos, I like to get them on CD when I get them developed, but just in case they rot on me in my lifetime, I extract the photos and zip them up.
It seems to be serving me well so far, but it’s probably only a matter of time before my cloud storage is full…
I have a 2TB external hard drive that I move everything to. My pictures back up to Dropbox automatically so I just move them from the folder to my hard drive (I keep them separate so I can empty the Dropbox easily and not have superfluous space being taken up).
I have a 4 tb harddrive for games and two 1 tb drives, one for art and one for other things. I don’t have much problem with digital images, the stuff that takes up the most space is instead my music and my GOG & Itch games archives. But the games are actually stored on the 9TB NAS my husband and I have in the house that’s connected to our router. (I also do backups to that).
I don’t have money for the cloud services, not for the amount of space I’d need for all my art and art-related assets. (180 gigs so far) and I save a LOT of stuff, too.
If I want anything from my phone I just save it to my computer.
augh thank u guys, a lot of neat tips to hear!! yeah i might just have to bite the bullet and slowly do a massive purge, kinda glad my phone has month/year categorizations so i can go through slowly … i do need to buy another hard drive since i have zero idea where my old one went (??? its somewhere in my house but i can NOT find it) so i’ll ponder on that after i trim things
(definitely sounds like i should consider more hard drive space my poor 1TB laptop is not having a fun time because of my games)
I have a Mega.NZ, havea booru on my VPS, upload my art online, use iCloud, and hope to set up a mediaserver on another vps at some point.
Admittedly, I save so much stuff and take so many screenshots that it’s never perfect, I still have over 15k photos on my phone, but eehh… Ehh… Ehh… My laptop is pretty clean which is what matters to me.
my poor 1TB laptop is not having a fun time because of my games)