Digital

Spring-clean your photograph folder

Objectives

To reduce the number of unnecessary photographs in the folder
To reduce the carbon released from keeping photographs

Green Value indicator

CO2 savings – Energy intensity:
Deleting large files like photos can help reduce CO2 emissions, and make your gadgets last longer, reducing the need to purchase in the future and reducing your electronics waste.

Explanation

Although it is a good thing to have photographs of the project, most of the times there are too many unnecessary photographs.

It is important to select the photographs that may be useful and erase the others, not only because of the advantages of having everything organised, but also because every photo saved on a device releases CO2, and the more photos, the more CO2.

According to cuernambiental.org, 100 gigabytes of information in the cloud produces up to 0,2 tons of CO2 in a year which are in servers that work non-stop every hour of every day. This amount of GB’s can come from photos taken by the phone or shared via WhatsApp or social media.

Check the folder of the photographs. Is every photo important?
Remove the photos that are blurry, have bad light or, are redundant.
Go to the bin and make sure these photos are deleted permanently.
If you are an experienced photographer, you can decide to erase the bad photos directly from your camera, without waiting to transfer them to the pc.

Photographs selected as good ones or final ones should be in a folder apart from the others, this will help you spot the ones to be deleted. Organising photos by using this method will help you to easily choose which should be posted/shared, preventing the loss of useful content. After the useless photos are erased, you can take those photos out from that safe folder and keep them in the original folder.

If the photos are erased periodically, there will be less CO2 emitted from them and there will be less confusion about which are the good ones and the useless ones. In addition, there will be less work to do, and the photos will always be ready in case they are needed.

PROS/CONS of the action

Pros:

More organised folder
Less CO2 released
Easier to find photos

Cons:

This cleaning must be done periodically and will take up some time
It must be done carefully and sometimes it can be difficult to select the good photographs that are going to be really used
Some good photos may be lost or erased during the process

Certified

Not Certified

Link to useful sources

Carbon and the Cloud - Hard facts about cloud storage The dark side of cloud computing: soaring carbon emissions https://www.theguardian.com

Uncovering the Environmental Impact of Cloud Computing https://earth.org