UK Suggests Deleting Old Photos to Save Water in Drought

It has been a hot summer in England, with the ongoing warm weather causing droughts. And now the UK government has stepped in with some unusual advice regarding old photos.

The National Drought Group met on Monday and discussed the dry spell that has been caused by the lowest amount of rainfall since 1976 — when there was a famous hot and dry summer.

Five areas of the U.K. have been declared officially in drought: Yorkshire, Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, and the West Midlands.

It’s an unusual situation for the notoriously rainy country and the Environment Agency published official advice which included typical suggestions like fixing leaks, hosepipe bans, and taking shorter showers. But there was another, more curious, suggestion: “Delete old pictures.”

“Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems,” the UK government explains on an official page.

The advice provoked ridicule on X (formerly Twitter). “What an absolute joke, ” writes Harry Williams. “Deleting unused data will also make your laptop lighter,” jokes Cheerful Mark.

Does Deleting Old Photos Really Save Water?

Of course, deleting digital photos doesn’t directly save water. However, since so many photos are stored in cloud services, that data ultimately lives on physical servers in real buildings, and those data centers require substantial cooling, which consumes water.

According to research by Oxford University, a modest, 1-megawatt data center — enough to supply power to roughly 1,000 homes — can consume 26 million liters of water each year through conventional cooling systems. The total water footprint grows further when factoring in the electricity needed to operate these facilities, since fossil fuel and nuclear power plants also depend heavily on water for cooling and steam production.

Tech companies have been experimenting with different solutions, such as Microsoft which has placed data centers underwater and Google has tried using recycled wastewater in Douglas County, Georgia.

Photographers and videographers are among the biggest storers of data, so it is something worth thinking about, whether those old files really need to be stored — especially during the hot summer months.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.