This is my simplistic dream -

I want my very own intern - first to scan all the photos that I so diligently placed into photo albums for 30 years and to then store the originals in archival envelopes and boxes.

Then they can organize all the photos into folders so that I can quickly delete the ones I don't want. I'll save the photos on disc/cloud/ stick so that I can give each kid their very own copy.

I'm pretty good about my email so that's not an issue. It's really just the photos and I need to get them under control before I start having grandchildren.

Maire

Maybe you could hire your very own Apple person to go through yours.

Marie_cate, do you know about the photomyne app? It's like magic, if you have an iPad/iPhone you can take a picture of each page of your paper photo albums and magically the pictures are separated and you can put them in digital albums. So much easier then scanning them one by one. I think the app was 4.99.

Photomyne info here

- I unsubscribe from any promotional email as soon as it irritates me. Usually takes two emails.

- I unsubscribe from any newsletters that I "mean to" but never read.

- Ditto for podcasts and listening

- When travelling or during other special events I try to weed down my photos daily. It's such a tedious task but I enjoy reliving the events of the day in my hotel room at night, on the plane, etc. Helps if I'm not driving!

- My music catalogue is a huge mess dating back to 1997 :(

- I don't keep many digital movies/tv shows/etc. Watch and let go.

- Quick way to clear out the inbox = make folders by sender for your most notorious senders and then just dump everything from that sender in the folder. Delete after a year if unread.

I use gmail tabs so it filters all the social media notifications into one tab, all the ads into another, the news alerts into another and so on. Then occasionally, I go into the folder, select all and delete. That cleans it up pretty quickly. The real mail is in a separate folder which I'm reluctant to delete as, as soon as I do, I find I needed it.

I was downloading all my alaska pics out of my camera into my computer and somehow, via the cloud, I think, it uploaded it all into my phone as well, just where I don't want them. If someone knows how to manage photos on my iphone or knows where I can go to manage them, I'd be most appreciative.

Annie,

. I have a question about those Gmail tabs. I have them too, they seem to automatically sort things based on their own algorithm. One of the first things I thought of doing was deleting everything under the tab "promotions". Then I looked , and some of the emails that I get from the kids schools are under that tab. Is there a way to"teach" Gmail not to put those under promotions?So that in the future I can safely delete all promotions?

Thanks in advance

To my knowledge, the only way to "teach" Gmail not to junk everything is to add the specific address to your contacts. I don't think you can add a partial address like @schoolname.edu so that it would accept anything from any child at the school. If there is a way I would sure like to know how.

Personally I have been thinking about my digital stash and I have decided that I would make books using a company like Shutterfly for instance or just get rid of the pictures. My reasoning is that so long as they're in electronic format I am not viewing them and they are not available for convenient sharing. On top of that, every picture I take increases the length of any future photo project. The bigger the project gets, the less likely I am to tackle it.

If you can sort your pictures out, you might invite each of your children to make their own photo book or perhaps books. Since I made this decision I found out that my husband is an ace at sorting through photos immediately after vacations and getting rid of anything that isn't perfectly in focus or interesting- also he can still add labels as to what it was. So on an ongoing basis we are doing very well. But that backlog…

BTW, I never tried to do this in mGmail before, but here is simple instructions for deleting email in bulk. The screen is a little different now but its easy to figure out

Bulk gmail deletion

How to delete files w large attachements

deleting large attachments

Mtn, I can so sympathize! I thought decluttering my home was a chore; it is nothing compared to the monstrous task of decluttering my computer. Every time I try to do it, I become so overwhelmed that I put it off to another day.

I have over 6000 showing on my email envelope. I'm thinking I may not add my work email to phone when I get a new phone. Unless boss wants to start paying for my service LOL

Photo storage, organization, and the decision to print or not upsets me. I'm half organized and backed up, but I dislike having everything digital. I like a physical print in front of me that I can hold. However, like many other people, due to the sheer volume of photos and videos I take there is no way I can print that many out. I can't stand making the decisions as to what to print, etc. My email needs sorted through again too. I find all of it annoying and overwhelming.

Your phone and tablet/computer can quickly become a nightmare of mail, photos, and apps.

I really do try to keep my photos organized but I have to stay on top of it. My solution to it is an external hard drive, which works for all the photos (files too), not just the ones from your camera. It is a little time consuming, but I try to go through them while on vacation to weed out the bad ones and poor duplicates at a minimum. Then when we get home I can pare down a few more and store the rest on the external drive. I also will choose quite a few and download to Shutterfly or Snapfish for making into a book or prints later. Once I'm convinced I have everything saved somewhere, I delete just about everything from my phone and ipad and then do an icloud sync.

Apps drive me crazy, so I'm in the process of deleting a lot of the ones I don't use.

Mail: I delete a lot of mail every day and have started unsubscribing from a lot of junk I don't use. Since I have merged mail accounts, I'm trying to phase out at least one mail account that I formerly used as my 'spam mail'. I could do a whole lot better with mail organization. I keep some in folders for later use and I have no idea why as I hardly ever go back to them (gardening, recipes, friends).

The bad thing is I just yesterday purchased a MacBook Air and now I have 3 devices to sync up and worry about. I actually did ask the Apple guy about all the devices syncing up and just adding to the pain of photos needing to be deleted and taking up storage. He just nodded and said 'yeah there is that'.

I try to keep my email accounts weeded, but it does get weedy occasionally. I do make folders and move things to those which makes it a little easier to weed those individually. I don't keep anything important in the email account because it's on their servers and if something goes wrong it can all be lost in the blink of an eye. Since Verizon bought yahoo I am telling all the people I help with their computers to start now getting everything they value off of yahoo and onto their computer hard drive or a backup hard drive. There are programs and apps that will find duplicates and allow you to delete extras. I rarely sync my devices just for that reason! I will transfer things that I find essential to have. If I need something I can go get it easily. I don't use Apple products so that helps with the whole sync thing. I have the ability to sync with Android too. I just am very controlling of it. I don't use a cloud at all. It is either on the device, my laptop or computer or a backup device no clouds. If I need to use something like Dropbox to share something I can then clear it out. I am guilty of taking 5 or 6 pictures of something to get the best, I am guilty of not immediately deleting the rest. I do have my photo gallery on the phone set up into folders and each photo tagged but that's not always helpful. Like here on gw I choose to post a picture, click Houzz photo, and select the gallery, but that's as far as I can get I can't then select a folder or a tag so I have to go through the entire contents of the gallery, making my decision to post a picture time consuming. The real key to the whole Mess is taking the time to do right now instead of I will do it later!

I'm dreading my dad's passing because, well, the obvious, but his digital mass. The emails, the accounts. Thank goodness DH is his personal geek squad and is pretty familiar with his computer. But if managing your own is daunting, imagine managing someone else's. And I need to be sure that all the bills will get paid, and they don't all come in the mail anymore.

You can create gmail filters so you can tell it to send certain people's messages to certain places.

Go to your SETTINGs and then Filters and Blocked Addresses. You can then set it to do specific things. So, for example, you could say if address contains @school.name.com then label it SCHOOL

I am very vigilant about my gmail box b/c I work online and do SEO for attorneys so I get emails all day and many of them are work-related. I religiously unsubscribe from everything so I get no junk mail. I set up gmails "Multiple Inboxes" and have three of the inboxes on my front page. My top one is "Work/Pending" which is where I put my "to-do-" list emails. My middle one is "orders" for things I"m waiting to have arrive or stuff like tickets for events in the future. My bottom is my regular inbox. As I emails come in, I immediately delete or label them.

I LOVE gmail. I strongly prefer it to the Mac email program and I always use the web browser to access it. I have it Pinned as my first tab in apple and I've installed an Ap so I get notified of and can compose incoming emails in my upper menu bar.

My biggest problem is my music library. I've been slowly going through and weeding down like 6,000 songs and I'm down to 2,500. I have SO MANY from college when people copied CDs onto my computer and I just have never gone through and gotten rid of the songs. And so many are terrible! I want my music to be organized!

Pictures I'm pretty good about deleting, but still have a lot.

Yes, you can teach it what tab to put it in by simply dragging the email to the appropriate tab. It will ask if you want to do this for all future emails and you say yes.

Thx everyone. The problem I am running into is that their schools, for example, use a variety of email accounts even within one school. Arrgggh.

I also find that most companies use a different email address for promotions then for communication about an order, for example. So it is easy to delete those. But NOT ALL. Esp smaller vendor, mix up both from the same addy .. but even a store like the Gap! You have to look closely.

So far, I've spent about 3-4 hours and only got rid of 3500 emails, and about 75% of the ones with very large attachments (I sorted those first). But I also:

- found a $191 credit at Calypso St Barth

- found great pics of our old house

- found out my son has to get concussion testing before sports start

- found out that Replacements has some pieces for my discontinued everyday WS flatware.

Keep in mind, this is JUST email. Still have to do photos, screenshots, and my Word/Excel files. And this is only my personal stuff ... not anything for work. What a PITA.

I am finding out who is guiltiest of stuffing my mailbox (Birchbox, Tripadvisor, WebMD and the Mayoclinic, cease and desist!) And I can't believe that, for example, a hotel I booked but ended up not even staying at has sent me about 50 promotional emails!?

maddielee - thanks for the Photomyne information - you're right about it being much quicker than scanning.

p.s. - perhaps an intern is overkill but I'd still like someone else to do the work.........

The filters would help w/ the school thing.

You can create on that allows you to say that if it has the school name anywhere in the email (in the address, the signature line, etc.) it goes into a separate folder/tab.

The secret is to set aside time to do a little bit every day. I recently researched how to archive a family photo collection, and one person said he set aside 10 minutes a day and after a year had all his family photos organized (~3500). I am just about to start that process. Just got a photo scanner this week. I need to set up a work room and my folks house and then I am just going to make myself work on it for an hour or two each weekend when I am there. Since I am not there every day, that will have to do. And then give yourself a reward for time spent doing that tedious task.

I have much sympathy for you. I have just been organizing my email after being guilted by visiting relatives who were horrified at my 24000 emails. I had tried to organize it before but have had more success this time by creating files and moving stuff I need to save to those files and then deleting what's left. For ex I'll do a search for anything with our schools name, move all those to the school file. Once I was pretty sure I'd moved everything of importance I deleted everything that was left in my inbox. The panic I felt doing this made me realize I was a bit of an electronic hoarder. And to be honest my hoarding helped after our house fire. When insurance questioned that the chandelier cost as much as it did, I was able to pull up the emailed invoice from RH that was probably ten years old. I had to do this many times as I order a lot online and insurance wants to give you the Walmart equivalent unless you can prove otherwise. Kind of felt vindicated for my hoarding. But really did need to get it under control. You've inspired me to tackle pics next.

bp@home wrote: "And I need to be sure that all the bills will get paid, and they don't all come in the mail anymore"

You can be sure if an online bill doesn't get paid, you'll get a paper copy in the mail before too long!

I keep my email organized and cleaned out, but the family pics are a daunting task. I also now have all of the pics from my parents' house. Someone had told me about a service where you can box everything up including old VHS tapes and send them in and they will digitize them. Does anyone know the name of a service like that? I should have written it down.

There is one called "Scan Cafe" that I looked into. I decided for now to go it alone, since it can get quite expensive. Scan Cafe is less expensive than a local service since they have efficiencies due to volume. However, they do send stuff overseas for some of the work so caveat emptor. I might do it if I had the dough, but since I don't I'm doing it myself and then will probably select some of the most significant photos for further digital enhancing. I found some local businesses that specialize in retouching old photos by googling. Most of them will also scan.

OK - I confess scrolling down to comment, so please forgive me if this has been said, but I've found the quickest way to clean out massive amounts of email is to use the search feature & pull up all the mails from 1 entity & delete them en masse.

For example, entering the search terms "macy", which will show me everything w/ macy in the sender, subject or message lines. Then I can check all, then look for things I don't want deleted (like a receipt) & uncheck those. Then I delete the rest, and so on...

It can be several categories a day or 1 big push, but it's so much faster than just scrolling down the inbox & checking each item. Gmail is very good for this because you can even apply labels to senders & preemptively file things.

& afterwards don't forget to empty the trash = J

And honestly, w/ gigabytes of mail storage, I have no qualms about saving every email receipt in a file on the server. Text files are tiny & it's been very helpful more than once.

Carol,

Yes, that is how I have been going about it. However, it is not always so straightforward. Most of the time the strictly promotional emails come from a given address. So you can delete them all. But a lot of smaller vendors do not have a separate email for that, and even some larger ones. Eg, when I click on an email from Zappos and bring up all the emails from that address, I get order information and random promotions not specific to me. So I have to comb thru a few pages to decide what to keep. Same w Gap et al.

Beagles,

Thanks, I will try to do that

Sorry to hijack, but I've moved on to organizing my gmail and am finding it frustrating compared to my yahoo email. When I do a search and then try to select all, it only selects the 50 on that page. Is there a way to actually select everything in that search? I'm finding it onerous when I have hundreds/thousands of emails in a search to move or delete just 50 at a time. TIA

yes, daisy, it will give you that option. look at the top of the page of emails

Look for this:

All 50 conversations on this page are selected. Select all conversations that match this search

Thanks, mtn. That's the same answer I got when I googled it, but it is not showing up for me. I will wait and ask my tech crew (ie teenagers) when they return from their trip.

Maddie, photomyne looks great. I'm going to download it because I have so many great photo albums that I never look at. I do often look at my photos on my mac but not physical copies.