Declutter your digital life

​Whether it's on the PC, smartphone or the web, your data is likely in need of a clean-up . From programs that wipe duplicates from the hard drive to organizing your desktop; from apps for managing photos to sorting your contact book; and from tools to find and delete large mails clogging the inbox to unfollowing spammers and bots on Twitter; here's how you can...

PC 

Identifying the mess 
Before you start with the process of decluttering your PC, it would help to know which folders are occupying the most space - and to do this, there is no better program than SpaceSniffer. 

Select the drive you want the software to analyse, and it 'sniffs' through its contents to measure the space your data occupies on that partition. 

The results are displayed in the form of a huge rectangle that represents your drive, populated by smaller rectangles to represent files and folders within. The larger the file, the bigger the rectangle, so you know what is occupying the most space in a single glance. 

After SpaceSniffer is done, you can just roll your cursor over any 'rectangle' for information on when that file/folder was created, when it was modified, and when it was last accessed. Double-clicking on any folder takes you one level deeper to show you the sizes of the files it contains. Armed with this information, deleting trash just became easier. www.uderzo.it 

Clearing your desktop 

If your desktop is a nightmare to navigate, then Fences is what you need. The software lets you create transparent tiles that are, in effect, folders for your data. 

For example, to clear up your desktop, just move your Word files to the Documents tile you have created for it, your pictures to the Photos tile - or however else you want to sort and segregate your content. Fences lets you see all the files you have stored in the transparent tiles without opening it. And here's the best part: doubleclick on your desktop and all your tiles are hidden, giving you a clean screen. Double-click again to make the tiles reappear.www.stardock.com/products/fences 

Deleting duplicates 

Some of the biggest hoarders of space are the duplicate files on the drive. For instance, we might have multiple copies of the same photos; or have the same MP3 in different folders. And in no time, it's almost impossible to keep track of all the copies we create on our large hard drives. Duplicate Cleaner Free to the rescue. 

As the name implies, this software scans your PC for copies of the same file. And you can also search for duplicate songs by tags. 

Run a scan to find detailed information such as the number of duplicates, the amount of space they occupy, file path, size, and creation and modified date. All that's left for you to do is select the duplicates and delete them. Of course, with the Pro version, you can find similar images and photos (even if they're edited, rotated or resized), search zip archives and even store your searches. www.duplicatecleaner.com 

Sorting to keep it clean 

So you have decluttered your machine and it's now in tip-top condition. But how do you ensure that your computer remains this organised? Well, use DropIt. 

Run the software and it creates a floating icon on the screen that becomes the central point to sort all your new files. You can then create rules for different file types. For instance, to move all '.jpg' files to the 'Photos' folder; move '.mp3' to the 'Songs' directory; '.avi' to 'Movies' ; and so on. 

Additionally, you can configure DropIt to automatically perform 14 different actions on your data (copy, compress, extract, rename, delete, open with, upload, send by mail, create list, create playlist, create shortcut, copy to clipboard, change properties, ignore), filter files by name, directory, size, date, content, etc. dropit.sourceforge.net 

MOBILE 

Merge & sync contacts 

Your phone's contact list is full of names, phone numbers, and maybe even email addresses and online handles. Managing all these different details for just one person can be tedious. Install Smartr (free for Android and iOS; available for Blackberry under its old name 'Xobni' ), which analyzes your contacts to smartly merge all the information for each person into single contact cards. 

If you are a Google user, you should look at its Sync service (www.google.com/sync/index.html). Follow step-by-step instructions to backup your phone contacts with your Gmail account. Once done, visit Gmail through a desktop web browser; go to the Contacts tab and spend some time manually merging contacts and deleting duplicates. It's time-consuming , but a one-time task that's worth it. 

Clean up SMSes 

Clearing up your old SMSes is always recommended, but before you do so, back them up. SMS Backup + for Android lets you backup texts to the memory card or your Gmail. iTunes has the native ability to backup your iPhone data to your hard drive or the iCloud service. In Settings, Windows Phone 8 can backup SMSes to Microsoft's cloud storage service, SkyDrive. The simplistically named SMS Backup for BlackBerry stores them on the phone and email. 

Organize your photos 

Photo Management: All these apps - Photo Manager Pro ( 170) for the iPhone, QuickPic (free) for Android, and Photo Lock ( 55) for Windows Phone can rename, sort, copy, edit and move images, as well as create folders. You can password-protect and hide images. And of course, they all offer a pleasant browsing experience too. 

Auto Uploaders: 

Don't clog your phone's memory; upload photos to a free cloud storage service such as Dropbox, SkyDrive, Minus or Box, all of which work on every major mobile OS, and have web interfaces as well. While all these apps support auto-upload , make sure you go into your app or phone Settings and set to 'upload only over Wi-Fi' , so you don't incur huge data charges. 

Browse Them All: 

Woven (free for Android, iPhone and Windows Phone) shows all your pics in a single place, irrespective of which web service - Flickr, Facebook, Dropbox, etc - you have uploaded your pictures to. Very handy. 

WEB 

Simplify your Gmail 

ActiveInbox is an extension for Chrome and Firefox that puts a new set of options in your Gmail. These tools allow you to set deadlines or reminders for individual emails, mark them as a priority, sort them by their importance, and label them to become parts of a project for easy accessibility in the future. You can also create your own rules for emails using the ActiveInbox toolbar. 

For example, suppose you get a mail from a colleague asking for a sales report. If this task is important and needs immediate attention, you can sort it into 'action' . Or if the report is due after a few days, you can mark it as 'later' and set a reminder for it. Filtering email in this task-based manner forces you to take an action on every Gmail message and helps sort out your emailing priorities. www.activeinboxhq.com 

Free up inbox space 

If you're running out of space on Gmail, use Find Big Mail to search your inbox for the largest messages. Submit your email and let it start up. It takes a little time, but once it scans through your inbox, you get labels in your Gmail to sort mails by size, letting you accordingly delete or back them up. www.findbigmail.com 

Stop the spam 

All web users face a barrage of unwanted emails full of various offers or schemes. Visit Swizzle - a cool web service available for Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo Mail, Me.Com and Mac.com - and grant it access to your inbox. It scans for such junk mails and gives the user the option to unsubscribe these unwanted mailing lists in a few clicks. www.theswizzle.com 

Reduce Facebook noise 

Are you tired of seeing "X is now friends with Y" or sponsored posts on your timeline? You need Facebook Purity, a browser extension available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. This nifty tool allows a user to control the FB timeline by giving you a set of options to filter out stuff you don't want to see, such as updates that tell you X liked Y, or A is friends with B, or sponsored posts. A cleaner and leaner Facebook experience awaits... www.fbpurity.com 

Clean up Twitter 

If you are a little overwhelmed by your Twitter timeline, try TwitCleaner. It will analyse the people you follow and give a detailed report, letting you find those who tweet only links or people who employ advertising networks. You can unfollow them if you think they don't add any value to your social media life. Similarly, you can find out inactive profiles and stop following them to make your follow list much cleaner. www.thetwitcleaner.com 

Manage your photos 

With photos spread across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Dropbox and more, you should rely on IFTTT (If This Then That) to reduce the clutter using its 'recipes' , which are rules for automatic connections between sites. For example, you can set a rule that "every time you are tagged in a photo on Facebook, it will be sent to Dropbox" , or "when I post a new Instagramphoto, post it to my Flickr also" . There are loads of such recipes that you can use to not only organize pictures but also your digital life. And yes, it sounds daunting, but IFTTT is really simple to use. www.ifttt.com