How I Cleaned Up the Thousands of Photos and Videos I Had Scattered Across the Internet

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.

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