I was reminded today that old school often has its benefits. Like most of us, I have my phone set to automatically backup photos to the cloud. I send everything to OneDrive because that's where I keep all my business records. My phone is an Android so I also send copies to Google Drive as a second backup. This afternoon, I discovered how many thousands of pictures I've taken in the past few years!
I was searching for a photo in Drive and was startled at how long the machine churned just to display the file list. Duh! In OneDrive, I routinely move recent photos out of the "root" Photos folder down into directories and subdirectories based on customer, year, and month. It's just easier to sort through recent photos that way. I haven't been doing that in Drive because I don't access those files on a regular basis. I never realized how bloated the Pictures folder was becoming.
So... cell phones have made it easy to amass thousands of digital images and sophisticated search functions have helped us forget about basic good housekeeping habits that date all the way back to DOS and beyond. The maxim remains that a rational root/branch directory structure pays off, and the same principle holds true with email... rational root/branch labeling can sometimes find an email where multiple searches have failed.
