My multimedia situation was a mess. After decades of taking photos and videos, I had stuff in five clouds — Google, Apple, Flickr, Dropbox, OneDrive — and also in offline locations like flash drives, jump drives, hard drives… I’m not a professional photographer, just a guy who’s taken his share of photos and videos over the years. You know how it is. You’re on a road trip, you take a bunch of nature shots, but after a few years, they don’t seem as amazing as they did from the car. Or my cats. Why did I take so many shots of them sleeping? Cats are cute, we get it, but did I need tons of pics to prove it? Another issue was that I’ve used phones with different operating systems — Blackberry, Samsung, Motorola (Android), Nokia (Windows) and now iPhone (iOS) — and different backup systems. I was going against the norm; the vast majority of people don’t deviate from one type of OS. I love my cats, but how many photos of them do I really need? Alex Valdes/CNET It was like throwing stuff into a garage or storage closet. It gets messier and messier. You tell yourself one day you’ll clean it up, but that day never comes. And that overstuffed procrastination comes with a price. The more cloud storage locations you have, the more you pay, and as the megabytes and gigabytes pile up, you often have to pay more each month for higher storage limits. It was time to suck it up and clean it up. After checking out various recommendations on how to go about it, I crafted my plan. My steps would be: gather, declutter and consolidate. Gather it all up First, I identified which cloud storage platforms I had photos and videos in. Then I located photos and videos I had on various jump drives, flash drives, SSDs and hard drives. I even revved up a couple of old desktops and laptops to see if I had anything there. I then uploaded the multimedia from external drives onto my laptop. My situation was a bit of a jumble. It’s a lot easier for folks who have their multimedia stored in only one or two cloud services. Read more: From Photo Backups to My Own Cloud Server: My Trip Into Home Data Storage Then I moved on to decluttering, which is likely the most time-consuming and grueling step. I went into each of my cloud storage accounts and weeded out photos that were blurry or otherwise of bad quality, duplicates or redundant, and photos that — now, years later — I can’t even remember why I took them in the first place. Duplicates are a major problem. This can happen for several reasons. If you automatically back up from different devices — perhaps an iPhone, tablet and digital camera — the same photo could literally be backed up three times. Or, it could be that you back up a photo that is shared with you on WhatsApp, but you already have that photo synced into your cloud storage. One beautiful leopard is fine, I don’t need a second one! Alex Valdes/CNET There are at least a couple of ways to remove duplicates. There are services that scan your cloud storage and locate them, and services that can scan your photos and videos after you’ve downloaded them onto your hard drive. Cloud Duplicate Finder ($40 for 3 months, $70 for 1 year, $96 for 2 years) scans multiple cloud storage services (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, Amazon S3) simultaneously to find duplicates. DeDuplicate can do the same thing with Google, OneDrive, Dropbox and others (not iCloud). It costs $8 on the App Store. Google also has a built-in tool that can find blurry photos and screenshots and delete them; it’s in the Manage Storage section . You can also remove duplicates by syncing your Google, OneDrive and Dropbox cloud to your local desktop, then using Duplicate Photo Cleaner to find duplicates. The app can scan the synced photos and find duplicates and also versions that have been edited, cropped or resized. You can then delete those and sync the changes back to the cloud, thereby removing dupes. The CCleaner app’s free version can scan your photo library and find identical
Sumber: CNET