I’ve spent the last two days deleting photos from my phone until my eyes are bloodshot. Honestly, I didn’t intend to do a major overhaul at first, but it’s probably just like cleaning a room: you wipe down a desk, then you want to mop the floor; once you mop the floor, you want to tidy up the bed.
Once I started organizing, I realized that the newer the phone, the “fatter” the photos are. A single photo on a new phone is three times the size of one on my old phone. Yet, before I upload them to my blog, I still compress them to around 720p. Since I can’t adjust the pixel settings on my phone, it’s just… (sigh).
So, I went through nearly six years of photos, deleted about 2,000 of them, and cleared up roughly 12 GB of space.
It feels quite absurd when I think about how I spend a tiny bit of time taking photos, only to spend a massive amount of time deleting them. Even though hard drive storage is huge and cheap these days, just dumping unorganized data in there to keep it out of sight and out of mind really isn’t my style.
After spending too much time tidying up, I’ve learned my lesson and decided to establish a “Digital Minimalism Manifesto” to try and control the volume of data at its source. This covers not just photos, but also messages and files—as a reminder to myself and for everyone else’s reference.
Digital Minimalism Manifesto
- I will think twice before pressing the shutter: Why am I taking this photo? Will I actually look at it?
Or will it be used at my funeral? - I will organize and delete duplicate photos immediately after traveling.
- I will delete emails, notes, and apps as I go.
- I will freely leave work-related groups that I no longer need.
- I will freely delete “friends” I don’t really know.
- For privacy reasons, I will back up most data to a hard drive.
- If I must use cloud backup, I won’t scatter data across different cloud services; I’ll stick to just one.
- If the files on my computer are constantly a mess, it means I need to redesign my workflow or file management system.
- Before keeping a piece of data, I will ask myself: does this spark joy?
Let’s embrace a digital minimalist lifestyle together!
NB: This article was first published in Chinese on 01/18/26. It was later translated with assistance from Typeless, edited by me, and published in English on 01/24/26.