Since late last year I have been slowly (very slowly) removing digital artefacts from a few places in my life. It partly goes hand in hand with the death plan I’m building —more on that later— and partly just a reaction to my loathing of having too much clutter, something that feels like a constant battle with a 4 year old in the house! At least my own digital artefacts are within my control.
I’ve tried to explain some of my thinking about this before but ultimately whilst it was separate reasoning that got me to this point, it’s fair to say that I was irked / bothered / narked by the digital clutter I had accumulated. It was becoming an issue to be dealt with.
My Detox
To recap, I am:
- Deleting Photos and Videos, mostly duplicates or v.similar shots
- Deleting old blog posts that have lost meaning (if they had any in the first place)
- Deleting old journal entries that don’t serve a purpose (mostly me ranting about things I can’t even recall now)
- Changing email addresses from Gmail to my own domain (why?)
- Updating passwords to be more secure (as flagged by Apple’s Passwords app).
It’s been a few months since I last posted about this and, whilst progress is slow, it is still happening in dribs and drabs which, given I never had a plan for this anyway, is a-ok.
It’s been an interesting process and very quickly highlighted some things that, I’ll be honest, I’m still figuring out how to tackle.
But I think I’m done with some of the categories.
Photos & Videos
It’s so easy to take photos with your Phone, so simple to grab a quick video. The vast bulk of the last 5 years has consisted of photos of my son, which is par for course for parents of the cutest, most adorable boy on the planet (which we are).
I also realise that I’m not that bad at taking time every now and then to delete photos, typically I’m looking at 5 or 6 quick snaps from the same moment and trying to find one to keep. This habit isn’t fully engrained though so there are periods where I have far more photos than I need. I tend to only go back to delete if it’s after a life event kinda thing, a holiday for example. The driver for that is typically pulling together an album to print (via PhotoBooks) and without that, the myriad of almost duplicate photos lie dormant, rarely revisited.
To that end I did turn on the Apple Photos Widget which does a reasonable job of resurfacing older photos into compiled Memories, which also gives me the occasional prompt to go back and tidy up a bit.
Yet the acting of sorting through all of these is onerous and a problem that I’ve not yet found a good solution for, beyond eyeballing each photo. There are apps that offer a ‘here are two photos that we think are v.similar’ function which is useful but still requires me to sit for long periods of time and spend decision making energy, neither of which I regularly have available.
And don’t get me started on the iOS apps that promise to help with swipe left to keep, swipe right to delete. Almost impossible to compare 2 or more photos that are very similar that way so I’ve avoided them.
That said, I did make the time every week or so and I made good inroads, but at present the energy required isn’t really worth the payback. I know I will always have lots of photos and videos and I think I’m ok with that.
Old Blog Posts
I used a slight cheat for this, looking at Word Counts and ultimately whilst I did delete a lot of posts, I think what I should have been doing was categorising them better.
So that’s likely to be the focus in the future, even if that’s just taking the category with the most posts —Life which has 1,170 posts— and doing some analysis on what other categories I could add, and I may use AI to assist in that.
For now though, I’m happy that the long tail of my blog is just that.
Journal entries
There’s been a slight shift in this task, I’ve been through all of my entries and deleted all the ones that mean nothing to me anymore and so hold either no value or just not enough value to be retained. A lot of those were one or two lines that, I’m sure at the time, were something I wanted to capture but as I didn’t capture enough detail they become an odd grouping of vapid commentary on life events so minor I can’t recall them.
What I am doing now, manually, is moving the entries I want to keep from Day One to Apple Journal. Yes Apple Journal has its issues, but it’s free and does all I need it to for now. For me this feels like my Apple Notes journey —when I ditched Evernote and moved to Apple Notes, I lost functionality that I realised I didn’t really need— and given that Apple Notes is being further enhanced in the coming OSes, as is Apple Journal, I figure I may as well move now, stay the course and see what happens.
What I HAD hoped from WWDC was an Import function. What I MAY get from the new Apple Shortcuts is a way to automate this work so I may pause this until the new OSes are released later this year.
Bye Bye Gmail
The most onerous task of this list, particularly with such a varied route to achieving this. Thankfully, I’m not too bad at deleting services/accounts I no longer use and whilst I’ve caught a few I missed, most of them I want to keep even if they are only of use every now and then.
That said, I’m getting there and as I’m done with Photos and Videos, still considering what to do next for my Blog Posts, and pausing the Journal move, then I can double down a bit and get this done.
Password Security
This is another process that can be a little onerous —going through each password and going to the website to update it and no doubt having to do more because the security for the service has been improved and my account is old etc etc— but I know it’s worthwhile.
That said, I’m already eyeing the announcement at WWDC that the Passwords App could do this for me automagically! I may wait until then, but what price security?
What I have learned
The main focus for all of this was to minimise my digital clutter and footprint. I think I’ve achieved that —I’ve also tidied up the documents and folders on my laptop which are all sync’d to iCloud— and I feel much more comfortable stopping most of these activities.
One thing I have noticed is, as I’ve been looking around for solutions to help with me with all of this, that I’m actually already in a pretty good place. I don’t have that many photos —especially when I compare them to the boxes of printed photos my parents left behind— and for the most part they capture moments I want to look back on, even the small incidental ones.
My blog too is an evolution of me, so those older posts still hold something of value (to me) and evoke memories of people and times that are now gone.
After that, moving journal entries and removing gmail are just things I WANT to do (with my own reasons) so ultimately the security of old passwords is the one thing that I should be focussing on, the only thing I NEED to do.
I’m not sure I had that view when I started this but I guess priorities change and, if I hadn’t gone through this exercise I probably wouldn’t have gotten to this realisation either. Digital clutter in and of itself isn’t as bad as I thought, and it’s entirely possible that a lot of my low level anxiety about it was more about control and my perceived lack of it.
2025 wasn’t a great year, and I can see now that some of the things I chose to focus on towards the end of it, and into 2026, were driven by a desire to have something to work on that I, and only I, controlled. A way to keep life at bay as best I could.
Regardless the reason, I am happy that my digital clutter is no longer an issue.
I wonder if it ever was.
What are your thoughts?