Greetings, all.
Even though I didn't mention it last week, I'm still pushing forward on my own 2025 Consistency Challenge project for this quarter: establishing a better family photo workflow using Immich and iCloud Photos Downloader. Most recently, I have it working with automatic synchronization of the three distinct photo sets that my wife and I interact with (hers/mine/ours). My next step is to experiment with what happens when a photo is moved from one set to another, but I don't expect any big problems. (Famous last words, eh?)
This Tuesday--and in fact, much of this week--I'm working on cleaning up and organizing a collection of Tidy Bytes material. How meta!
I've been working on Tidy Bytes for a while now, and as a result, there's a lot of content in a wide variety of places: email newsletters, blog posts, YouTube videos, social media, and so on. Some of it is easy enough to find directly from the website, but not all. Much of the more recent material isn't anywhere other than your inboxes! To correct this, I'm gathering my master copies of everything into a single location to be analyzed, indexed, and published (where applicable) more obviously on the website.
When I finish, you'll be able to take advantage of a comprehensive collection of data organization resources, indexed and searchable by topic (e.g. backups, tools, photos), series (e.g. "Tidy '24"), time, or general keywords. I'm excited for the outcome.
You'd think I would have done this from the beginning, but...well, it's one of those situations where my workflow grew and changed slowly enough that I didn't realize how far from optimal it had become. I'm sure many of you can relate, as this is a representative example of the kind of "slow mess accumulation" that plagues most of us in the world of digital data. Even if you start out with a good structure, exceptions or "temporary" tweaks accumulate like barnacles on a ship. Without regular review and clean-up, they build into something that requires a dedicated project to fully address.
No matter how good your systems and habits are, this kind of thing is bound to happen occasionally. As long as you step back every so often to see if you need to tidy things up or adjust your processes or tools, you can prevent it from becoming a significant issue. Depending on the nature and size of the system or project, reviewing at least every few months is a good plan.
In my case, with all this Tidy Bytes content, it's also a good opportunity to revisit some subjects I haven't covered in a while and see if there are any fresh developments or ideas I can pass along. Or, barring that, to see if I can find a better way to present the same information in a more useful and actionable way.
Stay tuned for updates on the content clean-up, and feel free to let me know if you're interested in any particular topics or ideas.
Until next week, happy data-taming!