Most people use the camera on their smartphone over traditional cameras these days to record their memories. One thing that is overlooked is backing up these photos off the phone. With a traditional digital camera, you had to import the photos into your computer, where there was a greater chance that these would get backed up.

With smartphones, these photos are shared to Facebook and Instagram but after that, they tend to stay on the device. A phone is far more likely to get damaged or stolen. I know people who have young children where the child’s entire life is on photos on the phone. What happens if the phone is damaged or destroyed.

If you sync your iPhone on a regular basis with your computer there is a good chance a backup is already being done with your photos. The method I describe here allows you great control and freedom to manage these photos.

This method will result in a copy of your photos on your computer and a copy in the cloud. For the cloud portion, I recommend Google Photos because of the ease of use and the fact that it offers unlimited use for photos under 15 megapixels.

What I like about this method is that once the photos are on your computer and Google Photos you can then remove them from your phone’s camera roll to save space. Running out of space on the device is a very common complaint. You can also access your photos from any software without being locked into any one product.

This method does not require you to sync your phone with your computer. I’ve seen that many people never actually plug the phone into sync it. The only downside is that you use more bandwidth as you will be copying photos to the cloud and back down to your computer. Many internet providers now offer an unlimited usage cap for a slightly higher price. I would highly recommend it.

Register for a free Gmail/google account if you don’t have one already.

From a space where you can use wifi on your phone, install the google photos app from the app store and tie it to your Gmail account. The only option you should check is to ensure that the option “Use mobile data to backup photos and videos” is not selected.  If you select that option you will burn through your cell data plan fairly quickly. At this point, you can start uploading your photos from your camera roll to Google Photos. Depending on the number of pictures you have and your upstream speed this step may take some time.

On your computer, go to photos.google.com/settings on your web browser and log in using your Google account and enable “Show Google Drive photos & videos in your Photos library”.

Go to drive.google.com and you should see a Google Photos directory that will have a few photos that the iPhone apps have already uploaded there.

On your PC or Mac install the Google Backup and Sync App. By default, the app will sync everything in your Google Drive including your photos. The google drive location will be your “users\username\Google Drive” folder on PC and on your Mac is will be in your username folder.

After the sync up to the cloud and to your computer is done, your photos are now in three places. Phone,  cloud and local computer. You can access your photos from any web browser by signing into photos.google.com with your Google password. You also access them directly on your computer by going to the google photo directory mentioned above.

Because the photos are now in your local folder it should then automatically be backed up as part of your backup system. (You do have a backup system right?). Once they are backed up if you need to free up space on your phone you can delete them from the camera roll.  The backups still exist in three places. Your computer, your local backup and google cloud.

On an ongoing basis when you are at a location where you can connect to wifi on your phone, run the Google photo app. The app will automatically upload any new photos to the cloud.  On your computer, the Google backup and sync app will automatically download those new photos to your local hard drive which will then be backed up by your local backup.

I can assist you with setting up this service if preferred. Please let me know at Stuart@sclarkconsulting.ca