Alexis Cox 🥉

I tried juggling iCloud, Google Photos, and an old NAS and it turned into a paid mess with ghost duplicates and broken Live Photos. Spent a weekend trashing files that looked the same until I realized the timestamps were different and every deduper was playing it safe. The costs creep up and every app tries to slurp from every folder by default, which made the loop even worse. What finally worked was picking the laptop as home base, turning off auto import on phone and tablet, and doing one clean dedupe using EXIF dates before syncing anywhere. If you do only one thing, set both devices to upload to a single cloud in original quality and keep a second offline backup drive so a subscription change does not nuke your sanity.

Honestly, the quick-and-safe route only gets you 70% there, but that's still worth it. Take it outside, hold the fan blades still with a toothpick, then hit the vents with short bursts from an air blower or canned air from a foot away so you're not spinning the fans to death or blowing moisture inside. I keep a small vacuum with a brush near the exhaust while I blow from the intake side, just enough suction to catch the dust cloud without yanking on anything. Wipe the grills and keyboard with a barely damp microfiber, then spot clean keys with a bit of isopropyl on a cotton swab and lift crumbs with painter's tape. Did this during finals when my fan sounded like a mini drone and temps dropped a few degrees, not magic, but the whine calmed down and it bought me time until I could afford a proper tear-down.

Pick one master home for everything (Apple Photos or Google Photos) and stick to it; turn on full‑resolution upload so the cloud copy is your source of truth. On a Mac/PC, sign into both services once, export originals from the one you're not keeping, and import them into the master so the whole history lives in one place. On that computer, enable a full local copy of the master library, and also export an organized archive to an external drive in simple folders like Year/Month; don't hand‑sort, just batch‑rename if you want dates in filenames. Use the Duplicates view in your photo app or a tool like Gemini Photos/PhotoSweeper to merge dupes before and after you import, so you don't keep five copies of the same pic. Then lean on the app's strengths: search by date/place/people, tap Favorite on the keepers, and make a few ongoing albums for things you'll actually reuse like "Kids school," "Travel docs," or "Receipts." Make it a five‑minute weekly habit: open the master app, delete obvious junk (screenshots, bursts you don't need), favorite the best from the week, and drop anything important into its album. For safety, use the 3‑2‑1 rule: your master cloud library, a local external‑drive copy of originals, and a second backup of that drive (either a second drive you rotate off‑site or a computer backup service). If storage is tight, do a yearly export of originals to the external drive and spot‑check you can open random files before you clear local device space. Don't convert formats when exporting; keep originals so Live Photos, bursts, and metadata survive. Put two reminders on your calendar—monthly mini‑triage and quarterly "export and test restore"—and you'll be able to find anything fast without ever doing a giant manual cleanup again.