Nearly 400 GB of photos and videos spread across five cloud services and multiple drives were gathered, culled and moved into Google Photos, slashing yearly storage spending from almost $300 to under $60.
The cleanup focused on deleting blurry shots, redundant images and especially videos, which can take 40MB to more than 200MB for 30 seconds on an iPhone versus roughly 2MB to 5MB for a typical photo.
Google became the main cloud repository, with Apple able to transfer copies directly while files from OneDrive, Dropbox, Flickr and external drives had to be downloaded and reuploaded.
The final setup followed the 3-2-1 backup rule: one copy on a computer, one on an external drive and one in the cloud, a structure that still requires regular updates to keep all three current.