Growing families, i.e. babies, obviously require TONS of photos. Falling close behind, of course, are selfies, things we’re about to eat, and place I am & you’re not.
I field a fair amount of phone calls from friends and family members about technological issues. One question that I’ve seem to get over & over:
“I’ve run out of space on my iPhone, how do I back-up my photos?”
At first glance, this seems pretty simple:
- Plug iPhone into computer
- Save photos from said iPhone to hard drive
- Erase photos from iPhone
- Unplug
- Take more photos
“Yes, but then I lose 24/7 access to them.”
OK, you can have your cake and eat it too!
So, let’s state the problem, just so we’re all on the same page:
Easily back-up photos on an iPhone, free up storage, but still have access to all your photos
iCloud
The first reaction is to use iCloud. While that’s certainly is a great way to BACK-UP your photos. Look around for a solution and you’ll quickly become confused w/ the different scenarios that will and won’t work. Long story short, you’ll end up losing photos sooner or later.
Flickr
Flickr, if you don’t know, is a cloud service for photos and video. Their free account is quite awesome. One terabyte of storage (that’s 62 iPhones). The photos are yours and you can adjust the privacy and sharing levels to limit how they appear in searches and who can see them. I have my privacy set to the max - the only people that can see my photos are my family.
Getting to the point…
The iPhone Flickr App
As you might have guessed, Flickr has an iPhone app - which has a preference setting to automatically send the photos from your camera roll to your Flickr account (that is, as long as you have the Flickr app running in the background). You can also select the photos from inside iPhone’s camera app and send them to Flickr manually.
Both solutions work quite well.
My suggestion is to go with Flickr, it’s easy, free, & reliable.
Good luck.