Photography

After you are done consolidating, you can take hard drives to The Shredding Place and they will shred the drives into pieces.

Google for 'hard drive docking station'.

Extract old hard drives from your old PCs, connect docking station to you new PC, insert old hard disks in dock, profit.

There are many ways you can do that. Some ideas:

• Get a nice big portable SSD, plug it into each computer in turn, and copy the files over.
• Use SD cards or USB flash drives to move the files over.
• Get a NAS (Network Attached Storage), hook each computer up to your LAN (as well as the NAS itself), copy the files over via the network.
• Hook all your computers up to your LAN and copy all the files onto the "main" one.
• Get one of those external HDD case thingies; these allow you to turn your old computers' HDDs into external HDD drives with a USB port; now you can plug them into your main computer and copy the files over directly.
• Pay for cloud storage and upload all your pictures there. (Caveat: assuming that we're talking hundreds of gigabytes of photos, this is going to cost a bit, and you'll need a generous internet connection, both in terms of upload speeds and data allowance - if you have fiber or cable, probably no problem, but with DSL, better check beforehand).
• If you live in the early 2000s: burn the pictures onto one or more DVDs and copy them over that way.
• Probably a ton of other ways.

I use exiftool to move all my pictures, skipping duplicates, into one place.

Also use https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka to find and sort local duplicates, as well as an app called PhotoSweeper X that can actually compare images and not just metadata.

I use a docking station. Sometimes old hard drives won't read on my Windows desktop due to how the hard drive was formatted, so I plug the docking station into an old laptop that I have an Ubuntu operating system on and I can access the pictures that way and move them over to a fresh new USB flash drive. If the drive is operating fine mechanically I will reformat it so that Windows can read it and I install it in a hard drive enclosure to use as an external drive for backups.

Yes.