Most of us carry a small hoarding problem in our pockets. A quick burst of shots at the school play, ten nearly identical selfies before posting one, the same receipt photographed twice just in case. Research from Photutorial found that in 2025, humanity took approximately 2.1 trillion photos! A good chunk of those are duplicates or blurry near-misses that will never see the light of day.
Here is where it gets surprising. Every photo sitting in the cloud lives on a server that runs day and night, somewhere in a warehouse-sized data centre drawing electricity around the clock. Take the one recently built in Hertfordshire on the site of Maxwell’s Farm, a patch of countryside that locals fought hard to keep. Data centres like this are going up across the country, and the energy they consume is anything but invisible. That blurry shot of your pocket from 2019 is, in some very small but very real sense, still burning fuel right now.
Storing 100 GB of data in the cloud for a year produces roughly 0.2 tonnes of CO₂. In photo terms, that translates to roughly 20,000 images. If your camera roll contains a few thousand pictures you will never look at again, the blurry ones, the duplicates, the accidental shots of your own pocket, deleting them does genuinely add up.
The good news is that several free tools will do most of the work for you. For iPhone users, Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner groups duplicates and similar shots together so you can sweep through them in minutes. Android users can do the same with CCleaner – Phone Cleaner, which also catches hidden caches and junk files. Either way, the whole job takes less time than making a cup of tea.
According to the 2021 census, Horsforth has around 8,866 households. If every one of us deleted just 1,250 forgotten photos, roughly one year’s worth of accidental and duplicate shots, and cleared them from cloud backup too, the collective saving across our community would amount to around 111 tonnes of CO₂. That is enough to offset roughly two return flights from Leeds Bradford to Málaga! Scale that habit across the UK’s 28 million households and the saving reaches around 350,000 tonnes of CO₂, the equivalent of grounding 7,000 such flights.
So here is your challenge: open your Photos app right now and search for last Christmas. How many versions of that one blurry turkey are you still paying to store in the cloud?
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Sources: Photutorial, Photo Statistics (2024); Stanford Magazine, Carbon and the Cloud; Office for National Statistics, Census 2021 Parish Profiles (Horsforth); https://www.dailymail.com/
Arash Rabbani, Lecturer in Computer Science, University of Leeds, July 2026