How to Digitally Declutter: Organizing Photos, Documents, and Memories
Safeguarding your memories by keeping photos and important documents is wonderful. They can remind you of many emotional moments and wonderful people. However, like large antique furniture, these keepsakes are beautiful but take up too much space. You need to sort through all of these items before you can declutter without throwing away anything valuable. Luckily, it’s not hard to make your documents, photos, and videos last forever these days — all you need are a few digital backups. Yet, even digital files can become a disorganized mess. Soon enough, it can become hard to find a single photo in years’ worth of digital accumulation. Don’t worry, though. Just like digitization can make your physical space less cluttered, knowing how to digitally declutter can do the same for your computer.
Digitizing Old Photos and Documents
Physical photos are vintage, cool, and more emotional than digital files. However, that doesn’t mean they don’t have downsides. Realistically, like any paper document, they take up space. Also, they’re quite easy to damage, sometimes beyond repair. That’s why digitizing old documents and photos and learning how to digitally declutter is the right way to go. And if you decide to create a vintage album, you can always print new, high-quality copies of the original digitized photo.
Challenges You Might Come Across
There’s no downside to digitizing old photos other than the associated cost — but only if you decide to perform the task yourself. In that case, you’ll need to buy a scanner. You can use a basic flatbed scanner for photos and documents, but unfortunately, they’re far from cheap.
The cheapest scanners cost about $300, but don’t expect them to produce digital files of particularly high quality. Professionals use far more expensive equipment, and not everyone is ready for such an investment. Even if you put the matter of price aside, digitizing your media comes with an additional set of challenges, such as quality issues and data loss risk. Additionally, the process can take up a lot of your time, and it requires quite a bit of skill. Luckily, you can find lots of how-to guides, online courses, and expert blogs. A good place to start is looking into the Capture website, where you can find professional advice on data conversion and even order equipment you'll surely need.
Preparing To Scan
Regardless of whether you plan on scanning the documents and photos yourself or having someone else do it, you need to organize your content beforehand. This will allow you to sort your photos and discard anything you don’t necessarily want to scan or keep. Think of this as a digital spring cleaning that will help you keep everything tidy. Once only the most important images remain, you can organize them based on various criteria:
The year they were taken
Family members and other people in the picture
The event they depict
This isn’t a strictly necessary step, but it will make organizing your folders far easier once everything is converted into digital files. You’ll quickly be able to reference how you organized your physical documents and photos.
Converting Older Formats into Digital Files
With today’s technology, you can convert almost any analog format into a digital file and keep it on a cloud storage platform. This goes for old VHS tapes as well. If you have any funny home videos, wedding recordings, or anything else you want to keep forever, now is the time to convert it.
Also, learning how to digitally declutter means more than getting rid of old VHS tapes. Think of all your old CDs and DVDs, which are slowly degrading and taking up space. You can also turn CDs into digital files without wasting any further space to store them anywhere. In fact, now is the perfect time to get rid of all old physical media and start keeping everything in a safer digital environment. Remember, CDs can get scratched, broken, or otherwise damaged. Extracting audio and video files from them has never been easier.
Organizing Digital Documents
Digitizing your documents, audio, video, and photo content is great. But if you don’t organize your newly created digital library properly, you’ll end up with a mess as big as before. Sure, disorganization doesn’t cost you space like physical clutter, but it costs you time.
Without a proper file structure, you’ll always need ages to find that one birthday video or photo from a cherished moment. That’s why you need to create an intuitive filing system. With it, you can categorize your digital content into logical categories, making it easier to find anything. Start with the broadest categories — like “Work” and “Personal.” Then, you can create subfolders in each main folder. Just make sure you’ve named all files consistently so you can easily search for anything specific in the future.
Storing and Backing Up
Scanned everything without losing quality? Great! Now is the time to organize your files into appropriate folders and make backups. As a rule of thumb, you should keep your files on a cloud storage platform rather than on your computer.
Or, at least, make a few backups in a place like iCloud or Google Drive. Otherwise, you’ll be far more susceptible to hardware failures and data loss. Plus, modern Internet connection speeds allow you to upload and download files quickly. There’s really no downside to cloud storage — other than the fact you might have to pay for more space.
Maintaining a Decluttered Digital Space
Now that you have a well-organized space for your digital files, you must learn how to maintain it. In other words, you need a regular maintenance routine to keep your files manageable and decluttered. For starters, set aside a few days each year to delete files you don’t need anymore and remove duplicates. You can also use this opportunity to create any additional folders and consider if existing ones need to be restructured.
Wrapping Up Your Digital Decluttering
With regular digital backups and cleanups, you’ll easily safeguard important files and keep your memories intact. Before any of this, though, you need to digitize your physical media first. After that, you can learn how to digitally declutter and maintain your file structure — on a hard drive or cloud storage.
