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Recently, after decades of paying high fees for the aging photo-sharing site Flickr, I finally moved all my images to Google Photos. It saved money and offered advanced features, like very accurate search results. But uploading years of pictures triggered the dreaded warning that I was approaching the storage limit of my Google account, which also holds Gmail, documents, spreadsheets, and other files. Cloud storage (be it Google Drive, iCloud, or Dropbox) is just one more in a growing list of subscriptions we all face, such as video and music streaming services, online magazines or newspapers, newsletters, Patreon sponsorship, and often just the right to keep using software. It’s especially frustrating to pay for photo storage when you know that most of those pictures and videos may be less than stellar. Google provides 15GB of free space per account. Beyond that, it charges $1.99/month for 100GB (my current plan), $2.99 for 200GB, then a pricey jump to 2 TB for $9.99. Its hard to resist capturing pictures and videos, and easy to resist weeding them. But tidying up Google Photos can be a nice money saver. Google offers cleanup tools for Photos, Gmail, and Drive, though how they workand how helpful they areisnt always obvious. Heres how to make sense of them. Manage storage Start at Manage storage, accessible via the cloud icon labeled Storage at the bottom of Google Photos left sidebar. You’ll see your current usage, an estimate of when youll run out, and an offer to upgrade. If space is tight, look at the Review and Delete tools. Large photos and videos This section can offer considerable savings, especially if you have large videos you can part with. My biggest file was a six-and-a-half-minute, 1.2GB video from a trip to Egypt last year. While viewing each video to decide if it’s worth deleting, also click the i icon in the upper-right to see the resolution. This helps when deciding whether to use the Storage Saver feature, which well discuss in a bit. Gmail and Google Drive Return to the Manage storage page, skip the next few sections and jump down to Gmail and Google Drive. All your Google apps share storage space, so clearing out Gmail and Drive makes more room for photos. (Roughly half of my 71GB glut came from Gmail, Drive, and other apps.) Click Review items, then scroll to Clean up by service. Under Gmail, you can delete emails with large attachments. This is where youll likely save the most space. Clearing out spam and trash helps, too. Then choose Google Drive and click the List view icon in the top-right to see file sizes. I found huge video and audio files I hadn’t needed for years. Deleting them reduced my Drive usage from 21.2GB to just 760MB. Recover storage Back on the Manage storage page, check out Recover storage: Convert existing photos and videos to Storage saver. This powerful tool lowers the resolution of large videos and photos to save space. Just note: Its irreversible, and applies to your whole accountwith no way to selectively shrink specific files. Storage saver converts videos over 1920 x 1080 down to that resolution. It also slightly reduces quality, even for videos shot at or below 1080p. This helps if youve shot a lot in 4K ultra HD. In my test, a 1-minute 4K, 60fps video shrank from 798MB to 30MBa 96% reduction. I noticed just a slight softening in a reduced iPhone 13 video of a room with ornate furniture and paintings. I viewed it at full screen on my 2000 Macbook Air with Retina Display at the top resolution of 1680 x 1050. (The default is 1440 by 900, and a clip in a web browser would display even smaller.) Storage saver also shrinks photos above 16MP down to that size (and it compresses larger formats, such as TIFF, to JPEG). I used Storage saver to reduce a 40 megapixel, 11MB JPEG photo down to 16MP and 2.3MB. I couldn’t spot differences on screeneven when zooming in. Google says that 16MP photos print well up to 24 x 16 inches. You can toggle Storage saver on or off for future uploads. On the web, click the gear icon in the upper right (next to your profile pic) to open Backup Quality. In the mobile app (in Android or iOS), tap your profile picture, then Backup, then the gear icon, and finally Backup quality. Dont forget to switch back to Original quality for uploads you want at full resolution. Screenshots Skip the Screenshots section and instead click Documents in the left sidebar. It shows screenshots plus other categories of nontypical photos with potentially short shelf lives, such as event tickets and receipts. Delete them individually, or select a batch by clicking the first, holding Shift, and clicking the last. To automate cleanup, toggle on Archive after 30 days, which moves items to the Archive folder, where you can delete them in blk anytime. Blurry photos This category may not help much. Googles blurry threshold is pretty low. If you delete all of them, you might lose some cherished soft-focus memories. And since blurry photos probably dont take much space, combing through them might not be worth the time. After decades of shooting, I had only about 300 “blurry” photos taking up 373MB. Other apps Heres another section you can probably skip: media taken with or shared through apps like Instagram or WhatsApp. You probably care more about whats in the pictures or videos than the source. Also, this section doesnt show file sizes, making it hard to know what to delete. Unsupported videos These are videos that Google Photos can’t play for some reason. They may be in an oddball file format; although Google supports such a large list of video (and photo) formats, that it’s unlikely the upload from your phone or camera won’t be covered. They may also be sub-one-second clipspossibly from accidental button taps: I found several in my account. Unsupported videos may be viewable after downloading. Both macOS and Windows (10 and later) have an app called Photos that can play videos, as well as extract a still image if you’d like to convert that tiny clip to a picture. Empty the Trash Deleted files go to the Trash folder, where theyll hang around for 60 days unless you clear them manually. To remove them permanently, click Trash in the left sidebar, then Empty trash in the upper right. Limiting Phone Uploads Android phones have a space-saving feature for new photos and videos you shoot. (It doesn’t affect what’s already been uploaded.) In the Photos app, tap your profile pic, go to Photos settings then Backup then Back up device folders, and toggle on or off image types to upload, such as screenshots or WhatsApp shares. iPhone users beware: The Free Up Space option in the Google Photos app doesnt reduce cloud storage. It simply deletes media from your phone thats already been uploaded (automatically) to Google Photos. If you also have iCloud Photos enabled, Free Up Space will remove files not only from your phone but also from your iCloud account.
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E-Commerce
In an emergency directive issued late last week, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced her departments plan to expand logging and timber production by 25% and, in the process, dismantle the half-century-old environmental review system that has blocked the federal government from finalizing major decisions concerning national forest lands without public insight. Under Rollinss direction and following an earlier executive order signed by President Donald Trump, the U.S. Forest Service would carry out the plan that designates 67 million acres of national forest lands as high or very high wildfire risk, classifies another 79 million acres as being in a state of declining forest health, and labels 34 million acres as at risk of wildfire, insects, and disease. All told, the declaration encompasses some 59% of Forest Service lands. Rollins made no mention of the role climate change plays in escalating wildfire risk or intensity, or how warming contributes to spreading plant diseases and expanding invasive species ranges. Climate change, it seems, has also been overlooked in the development of the Trump administrations proposed solutionto cut forests down. Healthy forests require work, and right now were facing a national forest emergency. We have an abundance of timber at high risk of wildfires in our national forests, said Rollins in a press release. I am proud to follow the bold leadership of President Trump by empowering forest managers to reduce constraints and minimize the risks of fire, insects, and disease so that we can strengthen the American timber industry and further enrich our forests with the resources they need to thrive. While it may seem intuitive that cutting down high-risk trees will lead to less organic material that could incinerate, environmentalists say the administrations plans to increase timber outputs, simplify permitting, and do away with certain environmental review processes are likely to only escalate wildfire risk and contribute more to climate change. Chopping down vast tracts of trees releases tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, exacerbating warming, which supercharges wildfire risk and causes blazes to burn faster and hotter. Though the climate science of timber management is complex, with techniques like prescribed burns considered widely effective in mitigating blaze-prone areas, the administrations aim to rapidly ramp up deregulated logging under the premise of lessening wildfire risk is poised to backfire, not least because of the carbon costs of cutting down forests. A map accompanying the memo from the Department of Agriculture, or USDA, indicates the stretches of forest that the agency has identified under the emergency designation. California, Colorado, Idaho, and Arizona appear to have the largest swaths of forest lands affected. Parts of the South, around the Great Lakes, and New England are also included. The USDA has not specified how many acres will be impacted per state. The agencys emergency order and push to expand logging to mitigate wildfire risk, ineffective as it can be if done haphazardly, is not a new strategy, said Lisa Dale, a lecturer at Columbia Universitys Climate School who has researched wildfire policy for decades. Similar declarations have been passed in multiple former administrations as a way to shortcut the time-consuming and onerous review processes under the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. What is new about this particular directive, however, is the USDAs explicit intention to remove NEPA processes. Trump imposed multiple limitations on the rule in his first term, most of which the Biden administration later revoked. In his second term, the president has sought to unravel how the sweeping environmental legislation is implemented, decentralizing how it has been governed and leaving it up to individual agencies to develop their own guidelines. Dale said this rings an alarm bell as the proposed elimination of NEPA processes at the USDA would mean that, in theory, a logging company could come into a forest and extract timber without having to first evaluate the environmental impacts of its actionslike when timber production overtakes endangered species habitats. Im a little skeptical about the premise of this memo, said Dale, who has been a longtime proponent for streamlining NEPA. The idea that were going to increase timber production by 25% and that that will be the equivalent of reducing wildfire risk? Thats the disconnect. As Dale noted, most of the really valuable timber is located only in a couple of states, in areas that are very difficult and expensive to access. Moreover, she said, none of those types of timber sales have much of an impact at all on wildfire risk. The USDA declined to comment for the story, but a spokesperson sent Grist a public letter issued by Chris French, the acting associate chief of the Forest Service. In the letter, French first directs all officers to use innovative and efficient approaches to meet the minimum requirements of NEPA, and later notes that the agency will soon release direction for using emergency NEPA to streamline and simplify our permitting process. The agencys emergency declaration comes even as it continues to cull federal funding for food and farm programs, and has attempted to substantially shrink the very workforce that manages forest health and wildfire management. Anna Medema, Sierra Clubs associate director of legislative and administrative advocacy for forests and public lands, said that the move will benefit industrial logging operations and create a negative climate feedback loop. She called the decision a boon for the logging industry and a disaster for our national forests. Other advocacy organizations, like the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, have vowed to use every legal tol at our disposal to halt the Trump administrations implementation of this order. Jack Algiere, director of agroecology at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a nonprofit farm and research center in New York, is holding out hope that agroforestry solutions will be included in how the Forest Service carries out the new emergency order. The thing with agriculture is that its working with living systems. It doesnt matter if youre in a forest or a vegetable field, said Algiere, who flagged there is no mention of a long-term implementation in the memo. Not all of these places are abandoned forests. Many of them already have management plans, and maybe this is going to disrupt that. Algiere also took note of how the language in the memorandum includes what he considers a lot of the right wordssuch as mentions of the Forest Service working toward land stewardship together with federally recognized tribes. And yet he cant help but think about how, at the same time, the USDA is freezing and cutting funding for food programs and scrubbing diversity, equity, and climate tenets from applications. This could have been written in a lot of different ways, he said. Not unlike the rest of the USDA, there seems to be a little bit of both sides getting played out. By Ayurella Horn-Muller, Grist This article was originally published by Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.
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E-Commerce
As the Trump administration has set its sights on dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the workplace, the prevailing narrative has been that private-sector companies are retreating from DEI programs. That’s true to some extent: Major employers have made notable changes to their DEI efforts, altering language in public filings and slashing or pausing career development programs for underrepresented groupsand corporate leaders have said they are losing sleep over the threat of DEI-related litigation. Still, it seems that many companies are continuing to invest in diversity programs, according to a benchmarking survey that culture and inclusion platform Paradigm released today. On the whole, federal contractors and large companiesthose with more than 10,000 employeesappear to be the most likely to make significant changes to their DEI work in response to the heightened scrutiny by the Trump administration and risk of legal action. (The survey polled more than 400 employers of different sizes across a range of industries, including some of the largest U.S. companies by revenue.) What DEI policies are changing Its true that employers are moving away from certain types of DEI initiatives. Many companies are, in fact, eliminating representation goalssomething that leading tech employers like Meta and Google have already done. Paradigm found that 38% of companies surveyed had either stopped using representation goals or are planning to do so. The vast majority of employers who still use representation goals92%said they plan to stop sharing those goals publicly, while 77% said they would not even disclose them internally. As the terminology of DEI has grown more polarizing, 39% of companies have also changed the language they use for their programs. What DEI policies are staying the same Even as employers pull back on some of these efforts, however, the budget for DEI work has not radically shifted at many companies, per Paradigms findings: Only 19% of employers said they are decreasing funding for DEI efforts. More than half claimed they are not making any changes, and 23% said they actually plan to increase funding. Given that the pushback to DEI has been brewing since the Supreme Courts 2023 ruling on affirmative action, its possible some of these companies had already made changes to how they allocated funding for diversity effortsor cut back on them altogether. As Fast Company has previously reported, plenty of companies were already reevaluating their financial commitments even prior to that ruling, and in some cases trimmed headcount for teams that were dedicated to DEI-related work. Joelle Emerson, cofounder and CEO of Paradigm, also posits that some companies may have just reallocated funding or outsourced certain aspects of their DEI work to organizations like hers. Weve worked with Fortune 500 companies that have a team of five learning designers building trainings from scratch on inclusive leadership or inclusive hiring, she says. Weand Im sure other [platforms]have really great content that doesn’t need to be reinvented for every single organization. The state of external rankings Over the past year, many companies have made headlines for pulling out of the Human Rights Campaigns Corporate Equality Index, an annual survey that measures workplace inclusion for LGBTQ+ employees and is often touted by companies that are looking to attract more diverse employees. But the Paradigm report indicates that even amid public pressure, many companies have not changed their stance on those rankingsat least not yet. Only 18% of respondents said they had already paused their participation in external rankings that measure inclusion or planned to do so. Emerson points out that many of the companies who, for example, pulled out of the Corporate Equality Index, were being pressured to do so by right-wing activists. But the companies that seem to be staying the course may not be talking about it openly or getting media attention. If you’re a company that’s not evolving away from these things, there would be no reason anyone would hear about it, she says. By and large, youre not going to be announcing that. Reducing legal risk Nearly all the companies surveyed by Paradigmat least 90%say they have already embedded DEI practices into their talent strategy, which includes continuing to source diverse talent. Most of them are also continuing to collect demographic data on employees and invest in inclusion trainings. Employee resource groups and DEI-related benefits like parental leave and trans healthcare coverage have also remained largely unchanged (though some companies are opening affinity groups up to all employees to mitigate legal risk). Emerson adds that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions recent guidance on DEI has actually helped clarify what could constitute unlawful discrimination for some employers, which had sparked widespread confusion when Trump first introduced executive orders targeting DEI. I don’t agree with a lot of the guidanceI think a lot of the things that they’re saying are essentially illegal DEI are, in fact, not, she says. But the guidance has given the companies we work with more confidence to continue with the things they’re doing.
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E-Commerce
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