The Photo Chaos Calculator
Twenty years of pictures across old phones, dead laptops, and three cloud accounts. Six sliders estimate how big the pile really is, and what it costs in hours to make it one findable library.
photos and videos, roughly
of storage once gathered
likely duplicates
of your own time to gather, deduplicate, organize, and verify it yourself, using good software and working efficiently. Call it of committed weekends.
Where the hours go
What the finished library looks like
One library, in one primary place, organized by year and event so any picture surfaces in under a minute. Two backups behind it: the cloud copy and a drive at home, because a photo that exists once is one failure from gone, and sync alone is not backup, since a deletion syncs too. The prints get scanned or at least photographed, so the shoeboxes join the library instead of waiting out another decade in the closet.
A NOTE FROM ORDERED
The math above is honest, and plenty of people put in those weekends and are glad they did. Ordered does the same work as a fixed-scope organization project: we gather every source, collapse the duplicates, build the year-and-event structure, set up the two backups, and hand you a library where any photograph from the last twenty years is findable in under a minute. You get the hours back, and the shoeboxes finally empty.
Estimates run wide by nature; treat the numbers as a defensible middle, plus or minus a third. Video habits swing storage most of all.