Yet another storage crisis

Although I'm not too bothered by the pile-up in the studio, when it comes to lack of space on my phone, I'm overwhelmed.

An avalanche of photos waits to be deleted to "free up space on device". 

(via)

And until there is space - ie, some memory is free - it's not possible to take photos with the phone. Disaster! Crisis! Panic!

First step - research. There is a lot of clear and helpful info online on "quick ways to clear space", for instance this, from which we learn that

Oreo [on Android] includes a new toggle called Smart Storage that can work wonders without needing to do a thing. Flip it on, and your phone will automatically clear out the biggest space-stealing culprit: photos and videos.

No no no, screams my Inner Hoarder, fearing an irreperable loss. Scroll past the photo of the screen in that article and calm down...........

Since we all forget to clear out our photo libraries regularly, you can choose to automatically remove backed-up photos and videos after 30, 60, or 90 days, making sure your phone isn’t stuffed with duplicate photos. 

Good plan (the photos are automatically backed up to googlepix on the computer) - but my phone may be too old for this. It seems to be an all-or-nothing model when it comes to removing items. So it's back to Plan B....

On Fridays, on the computer, I put the week's most important pix (the grandbaby, and a limited number of "creative" categories) into albums and then send them to the Archive [deleting them outright would wipe them out], which means that on the phone they can be found in Albums. The next step is to archive the lot but first I need to (a) decide on a few other "important" categories and make Albums and (b) go through the backlog... it would also help to (c) get into the habit of taking fewer photos!

This article on freeing space on Android phones gives more info on Google Photos -

which provides unlimited backup of high-quality photos and videos – up to
16 megapixels for photos and full-HD for videos – to your Google account.
You can also back up in the original resolution, but that will count as part of your
storage limit (15GB for most users*). 

If you’ve automatic backup in Google Photos turned on, pull up the menu from within
the app, and choose Free up space. This will remove all backed-up photos and videos
from your device, and they’ll be downloaded from the Internet when you go to view them next time.

*"Google gives 15 gigs of free cloud storage with every account, so you might as well use it. Anything inside your Downloads or Files app can be jettisoned to your Google Drive by tapping the menu button in the top right corner and choosing “Send to...” This will open the share sheet, where you can select select Save to Drive to choose which folder to add it to. Then you can delete it from your phone without losing it forever." (via)

"Why don't you just get a SIM card?" Oh if only it was that easy - my phone, the OnePlus, has no slot for a SIM card. Grrr. Otherwise the phone works fine (when there's memory space) - and I don't want to add yet another "old" but otherwise satisfactory electronic device to the mountains of wasted resources.

1.5 billion smartphones were sold in 2017; what happened
to the phones they replaced?     (via)

It's a useful personal challenge to learn how to use this phone efficiently and to keep it going. It ain't broke, so why try to fix it? The problem is with the user interface! Fixing that takes "only" time, thought, learning, and the willingness to change old habits.

Some progress has been made, and since then, many photos have been put in albums and archived on the computer, and entire weeks of 2017 have been deleted from the phone. We're not there yet, but I'm hopeful....

Of course I've set out to "get really on top of this" many times before, but it's like quitting smoking - each time you try, you get a little closer to eventual success.