Dealing with being a digital packrat

My laptop only has a 750G hard drive which is quickly filling up. So, I spent all weekend cleaning it up and moving files to my Mac Mini server. One of my biggest headaches is my photo and music libraries. I’ve had iPhoto and iTunes since they existed. (The first iPod was a portable firewire hard drive that also played music! I couldn’t pass that up. I’ve also been taking digital photos since digital cameras came onto the market, which means I have tons of pictures.) This has lead to my libraries growing wildly rampant and becoming totally out of control.

So, rather than dealing with the headache that comes with trying to fix it all manually, I found a software solution to help out and I highly recommend them: http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/

My biggest deal was moving files off of my laptop and on to my server, but still having them easily accessible from my laptop. I have multiple iTunes libraries due to having multiple computers over the years and backing up to different computers at different times. These can be difficult to manage and lead to missing (orphaned) files. Powertunes found all my random files and now my phone (which I had to replace a couple of months ago) has all my relevant music back on it! (Only took a full day to copy it all over, but that was all iTunes.)

I also wanted to break up my iPhoto library into smaller ones so I could archive parts off. While splitting up over 20 thousand photos and videos has taken a long time – it’s totally worth it. Next on my list will be to tackle my resources library. I think I’m finally going to bite the bullet and buy Adobe CC education edition while I still can. Then I’m going to use the updated Bridge to organize my my 15gb of digital resources. If you have any other recommendations for organizing digital assets locally, please leave a comment!