Photo organization update

I used to be so on top of things when it came to organizing my photos, but the past few years are just a mess. Having a phone with a decent camera has led me to taking many more pictures than I used to, and I haven't done a very good job about moving them to my computer and organizing them there. One of my goals for this year is to finish with the digitization of my old photos and videos, but there's an awful lot of stuff that I've already got in digital format that needs to be dealt with as well.

One thing I finally accomplished a few weeks ago was finishing the Shutterfly photobook of the trip that Fred and I made to Hawaii to celebrate my 50th birthday (3 years ago). Yay, me!

There are a few basic tasks that I really need to do to get back on the road to total photo (and video) organization.

• Clean out the downloads folder on my computer.
• Run a de-duplication program on my computer to find files where I have the same item stashed in more than one location. (These first 2 items would also help me in my quest to organize my digital and non-digital files in general.)
• Clean the junk photos off my phone.
• Figure out a plan for how far back I want the photos on my phone to go. On the one hand it's nice to be able to scroll back and find an old picture, but honestly I have an easier time locating a file when it's on my computer with metadata that makes sense. I don't think I want photos on both the camera and the computer (don't worry, my computer is constantly backed up offsite, currently with Carbonite but I'm considering finding a different service), because then I will not know from looking at my phone whether a file is on the computer or not.

I need to carve out 15 or 20 minutes every day to work on this.