Angela Cox 🥉

Honestly, bundles rarely save if you barely watch. I track my shows in a spreadsheet and rotate one service per month. It cuts the bill to a quarter and I still catch everything by binging in batches. If a must-watch drops mid-rotation, I swap that month and pause the other. One bundle locks you in and you end up paying for idle.

Group by event or location first and then date subfolders. Use consistent naming like YYYY-MM-DD_event. It keeps my chaotic mind from spiraling.

Use Google Photos to auto-backup and delete originals after verifying backups.

Chaos wrangler here: I flipped on Google Photos backup for both phones and use the desktop uploader on the laptop. While the nuggets reheat, I favorite a few keepers and delete screenshots. Once a month I run the built-in duplicate cleanup and it merges copies, then I toss favorites into a simple Highlights 2025 album. Search carries the rest so I quit micromanaging and my blood pressure thanks me.

I built it with zero cost tools. Calendar reminder every weekday at 4, immediately after my last class, so no decision. I do 20 minutes minimum in the campus gym or a bodyweight circuit outside. I track sets in Google Sheets and bump one thing each week. If I miss, I move it to the next day and cut volume in half to keep the streak going.

The easiest set-it-and-forget-it method is to turn on automatic cloud backup and let it run in the background. On iPhone, go to Settings > your name > iCloud > Photos and switch on Sync this iPhone, then choose Optimize iPhone Storage so it keeps full-res in iCloud but saves space on the phone. On Android, open Google Photos, tap your profile photo > Photos settings > Backup, turn on Back up, set Upload size to Original if you have space or Storage saver if you want to use less, and set Use cellular data for backup to off. If you have Amazon Prime, the Amazon Photos app gives unlimited full‑resolution photo backup for no extra cost, so install it, open Settings > Uploads and enable Auto-Save for photos and leave videos off if you want to stay within the free 5 GB for videos. If you use Microsoft 365, the OneDrive app's Camera Upload is also solid and is under Me > Settings > Camera Upload. In any of these, leave the app signed in, allow background refresh, and set uploads to Wi‑Fi only and while charging for a true hands-off setup. For real peace of mind, keep a second copy a few times a year on a computer or external drive. On a Mac with an iPhone, open the Photos app and click Import from your device, or use Image Capture to dump originals to a folder on an external drive. On Windows with an iPhone, plug in, tap Trust on the phone, then in the Photos app click Import or in File Explorer copy DCIM to a backup folder. On Android, connect via USB in File Transfer mode and copy the DCIM and Pictures folders to an external drive, then verify a few files open before you delete anything.

Pick one place to be your master library and consolidate there first. For a mix of iPhone and Android, Google Photos is the least painful long term. On your laptop create a Photos_Master folder with subfolders like 2021/2021-07-04 Beach and copy everything into it from the iPhone and the Android DCIM folders using a cable or your OS photo importer. Before you upload and run a dedupe pass with dupeGuru or digiKam using content hashing and keep the highest resolution copy or the HEIC original. If some shots have wrong dates or time zones, fix them in digiKam and write metadata to files so it sticks. Install Google Drive for desktop on the laptop, add Photos_Master under My Computer, and check Upload photos and videos to Google Photos so it uploads once without mirroring into Drive. On the iPhone and Android tablet install Google Photos and turn on Backup, and turn off any other auto importers to avoid double uploads such as iCloud Photos or OneDrive camera upload during the migration. Going forward, do all culling and albums in Google Photos, but keep the folder structure as your durable backbone since folders survive any app change while albums are app specific. Periodically export your full library to an external drive using Google Takeout or a desktop sync so you have an offline copy, and add a second backup like Time Machine, File History, or Backblaze to cover the 3-2-1 rule. Expect Google Photos to suppress exact duplicates on upload but keep edited versions as separate items, which is normal and avoids silent data loss. Also disable auto saving from chat apps to the camera roll to cut down on clutter and future duplicates.

Easy — delete everything older than last Tuesday. Boom, organized. Or just keep swiping like it's a slot machine and call it mindfulness.