Phone Storage and Backup

Need to save some space on your phone? Here are some options.

Get the Google Photos app! It doesn't matter whether you're on Android or iOS, do it and do it now! Turn on the backup feature. If you really do have a tremendous amount of photos and more importantly video which takes up much more space than photos, then you may end up having to pay for extra storage. It's cheap. Currently, 20 bucks a year will get you the first hundred gigabytes and not too many people go past that. Make sure that you are on your Wi-Fi so that you don't burn through all of your cellular data while it is uploading all of your photos initially(you can also tell it not to use cellular data for uploads, but if you have unlimited data once the initial upload is done, turn the cellular back on so it immediately uploads photos). If you'd like, it offers a feature to remove the photos off of your phone to save space. At that point, the photos will be in your Google account, and not on your phone. This means you will still be able to see all of your photos, they just won't be local. In Google Photos you will also want to decide what quality you want to upload. Google saves a little space by optimizing your photos if you do it by the default settings. I like full quality so I pay for the extra storage.

Google Drive. This one is a little bit more involved, though not bad. I will link an article down below. I would do both Google Photos and Google Drive. This is by default if you have an Android phone, but on iOS, you have to install separate apps. I like to think of it as Photos for viewing your photos, and Google Drive for uploading and viewing your Google Drive if you're already a Google user.

If you have Amazon Prime, one of the features they give, is using their Amazon Photos app also and doing a similar function of backing up to the cloud. I don't care for this app as much as I like the Google Photos app, but having your photos in multiple places is a good idea. “Prime members get unlimited full-resolution photo storage and 5 GB for video”. Those 5 GB of video will probably fill up quickly and not be much of a benefit, but the full size and unlimited photos storage is a good thing. They also let you increase your storage for $20 per year for the first 100 GB

If you are on an iPhone, you should 100% be backing up to your iCloud. They also offer low cost extra storage.

You will want to go into each app and decide whether you want to keep photos on your phone or not and whether it syncs the deletions if you remove photos from your phone, and you want to keep them on your cloud service. Personally I trust Google much more than Apple for the backups, I've just seen the iCloud backup fail too many times.

I had a client lose her iPhone. Fortunately, we had backed up all her photos to Google Photos and she could see recent pictures of her new grandbaby. The lost iPhone had failed to back up to iCloud. This is one of the reasons why I'm such a fan of Google Photos, but also, using multiple services to backup.

Having a good backup is a great way to make sure you never lose a memory.

Link to how to back up your data with Google.

https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9149304?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DiOS

Google Drive for iOS

https://www.androidpolice.com/set-up-use-google-drive-iphone/