Jump Start January: Week 2 Day 6

Time for a new declutter today, and maybe it’s something you’ve been putting off for a while? We’re going to sort out some of our photos or music.

All you have to do today is choose between photos or music, then get stray files together into the same place and tidy them up properly.

Do you have audio or visual files that are a mess? Think about where you might have stored them – different places on your computer, tablet, MP3 player, camera, or smartphone? Have a search so you know where they’ve all ended up.

Now decide where you’re going to keep your main collection: computer, cloud-based storage, Dropbox or any other storage facility. Make a main folder and start transferring.

Next, do some quality control. Get rid of at least a few pictures that have no personal importance or technical merit (you know, the ones where you accidentally took a shot of your own thumb or the whole thing was out of focus), or get rid of some music tracks that you actively dislike or will never listen to again. Lighten the load – it’s still clutter and it stops you getting around your collection as quickly as you’d like.

If you have time, do some labelling, or add notes or keywords.

Now make at least one backup of some sort. A few months ago a professional photographer told me that unless an image is backed up to three different places, it might as well not exist (catastrophe can strike in more than two places at the same time so they were protecting their livelihood). Your backup could be to an external hard drive, or online storage etc.

My photos and artwork are all over the place here, and I’ll be consolidating and backing them up today (finally).

What about you? What’s your worst mess, photos or music files?