Cleaning House

Google has recently let me know that my cloud storage space is nearly full. They're kindly offering to sell me more room on their server but I'm going to politely decline.

For me, the notification is a reminder that I need to clean house and get rid of files that I no longer need to keep. I store my photos on an external drive, as a backup, and so I don't really need to hang on to everything on the cloud, especially photos that I've shot but never intended to use or keep.

And so, I've started deleting files.

I've started with the video footage that I've pulled off my 360-degree cameras, as they are storage hogs. I've made sure that I've moved them onto external drives and no longer need them in my Google albums (especially, the clips that I've already used to make YouTube videos).

I then started digging deep into my still photos, and there are a lot of images that I've captured with my smartphones over the years, but never looked at them again after I saw similar shots that I had also captured with my D-SLR cameras. I essentially forgot about these photos but in truth, I should have deleted them from my Google photo storage space.

Shortly after I left Twitter for Mastodon, I started looking at my older photos and began posting a 'random photo of the day.' I'd quickly scroll through the thousands of images and stop on one, and then post it without much explanation of the photo, apart from a bunch of hashtags and a description of the photo for those with visual impairments.

As I was scrolling through my images, looking to delete the files that I don't really need to keep, I was also looking for Sunday's random photo of the day, and my finger fell on a series of photos that I took, in 2016, when my family was vacationing in Arizona.

We had made an excursion to Page, a small town in the north of Arizona, close to the Utah border. Page is famous for Horseshoe Bend, a U-shaped canyon of the Colorado River, and a series of smaller canyons, the upper and lower Antelope Canyons.

I had signed up for a photography tour, where I used my D-SLR, various lenses, and a tripod, and captured hundreds of images of these fabulous, wind-and-water-carved gorges. But as we were wrapping up and heading out of the canyon, I snapped a bunch of shots with my smartphone at the time.

The photos didn't do the Lower Antelope Canyon justice: the colours were muted and the images weren't particularly sharp. My D-SLR had done a much better job so I never looked at the images again, nor did I delete them from my phone.

And now, my finger had stopped on these images for my Mastodon random photo of the day.

I decided to try my luck in running these photos through Snapseed and I was able to bring out more depth of colour from them. After playing with a couple of the images, I settled on one, and posted it to my social media instance.

And then I deleted the originals and all of the other edited shots.

I'm now curious about what other forgotten photos I'll come across as I clean house. If they're interesting enough, I'll share them down the road, after I move them onto my external drive.

Happy Friday!