I’ve finally been forced to do something about my photo archive having nearly reached the limit that Adobe Creative Cloud offers.

I’ve been using Lightroom for years now, and love how easy it is to upload my photos from my phone and my camera via the Lightroom Mobile app, and then periodically sync them from the cloud to my external hard drive via my computer. Over the past couple of months I’ve been constantly notified that the storage is running out. Today I’m so close to hitting it that I’ve had to sit down with my computer and do something about it.

I like to think I’m pretty tech savvy and generally Lightroom has been pretty intuitive to use. There are a few things that annoy me about it – like the fact that you can’t add tags, titles and captions in the app and sync them across to Lightroom Classic on the computer – but it mostly works for my purposes. Clearing space on the cloud is proving to not be so intuitive.

I’ve searched the internet for answers but most of the search results that come up are either really old, so refer to older versions of the software, or just don’t make any sense. Surely what I’m trying to do isn’t that complicated? I simply want to unsync some older photos and get on with my life.

Unless I’ve missed something, unsyncing ‘collections’ (Lightroom’s name for a folder) only unsyncs the folder. It doesn’t unsync the photos within it. They remain in the ‘all synced photographs’ folder from where you then need to remove them. If I remove them from ‘all synced photographs’ without unsyncing the folder they are in, they will be removed from the folder too which defeats the object of having my photos organised at all. If I was removing things solely based on date, or if I had been using things like flags, ratings and labels to catalogue my photographs, it would be relatively simple, though still time consuming, to deal with this. Unsync the folder and then filter on the relevant metadata to remove them from the all synced folder too.

Sometimes it is easier to just start again and hopefully the approach I’ve settled on will work. I’m currently waiting for all the synced collections to unsync, at which point I’m going to remove all photos older than 2023 from the all synced photos folder. I can then start again with syncing the folders that I want to retain in the cloud.

This has given me a bit of a wake up call about the need to be better at keeping on top of my photo archive. I’m rubbish at being ruthless and getting rid of the photos that don’t hit a decent standard. I file away photos into collections based on a topic, such as toilet signs, memorial benches, street art by specific artists etc, with the intention to share those collections, but I never do anything about it. So many of the photos I take never get seen by anyone, sometimes including the friends and family in them.

I’ve referred to myself before as a hoarder, and that means both physical and digital stuff. I’ve done well in recent years at clearing through the physical stuff and trying not to add to it, but the digital hoard is just growing day by day. I have a visual memory which is why photos are so important to me. Someone describing a memory to me often doesn’t resonate but as soon as I see a picture of it, the whole experience comes flooding back. I also love documenting the world around me – this weekend in particular has been a great one for photographing life on the streets of London which means I’ve added yet more photos to my archive.

I sometimes think I would’ve enjoyed being a librarian. I love keeping things in order to make it easier to find things in future. It’s something I’m good at doing at work, especially when it’s been a part of my job, but my personal life is definitely less ordered. I have catalogued by jewellery and clothes (I clearly had too much time on my hands in lockdown!) but have yet to do it with books which would be really handy when out about to know whether we’ve already for something. That said, I’ve learned it’s a lot easier to catalogue or file things in a sensible fashion from offset rather than trying to tackle 20 years worth of digital photos.

Assuming this approach works I’m going to make a concerted effort to keep on top of the new photos I take and start to deal with the huge backlog I’ve created over the years.