For my passwords (stored in 1Password), photos (stored in Photos.app) and generic archived files, I’ve adopted a strategy to deal with the unmaintainable mess it becomes:

1. Create a folder/vault/… named “Purgatory”.
2. Move everything in there.

If it turns out that later on, I need something from there, I will move the item out of purgatory and into its proper place.

Most of my files and photos are still in purgatory, but my 1Password mess is slowly but surely being cleaned up, and data in the 1Password purgatory is slowly trickling into its proper vaults.

I’m not sure how this will hold up in the long term, but for now, having a separate place to put all the things I don’t want to think about is really useful for me.

For the archive, I’ve not been adding anything to the purgatory folder since I started to Organize electronic archives by year.

Similar approaches

Tiago Forte suggests starting the journey towards organizing files by putting everything into an archive folder:¹¹¹ Tiago Forte, The PARA Method: Simplify, Organize, and Master Your Digital Life (Atria Books, 2023). 

Here’s what I want you to do: select all the existing files, documents, folders, notes, etc. in your Documents folder (which may number in the hundreds or even thousands or more) and move them all at once into a new folder called “Archive [Today’s date].”

What I call “purgatory”, he calls “archive” — same idea.