Back up your photos so you never lose them

Most people’s entire photo collection exists in exactly one place. If that phone goes into the lake, or that computer stops turning on, the lot is gone.

People know this, vaguely, and put off doing anything about it because it sounds complicated. It is not, and it is worth an hour of your life.

The only rule you need

Keep your photos in two places, and make sure one of those places is not in your house.

Two copies, because one device failing should not be a catastrophe. Somewhere else, because fire, flood and burglary take everything in the room at once.

That is the whole principle. Everything below is just ways of achieving it.

The easiest approach: automatic cloud backup

Your phone almost certainly already offers this. It copies each photo to the company’s servers as you take it, so a lost phone is an expensive nuisance rather than a personal disaster.

iPhone and iPad: Settings, tap your name at the top, iCloud, Photos, and turn on Sync this iPhone. Apple gives you 5GB free, which fills quickly. Extra storage is a couple of dollars a month, and the family plan is shared.

Android: Open the Google Photos app, tap your profile picture, and turn on Backup. Google gives 15GB free across the whole account, including Gmail.

Windows: OneDrive is already installed. Open it, sign in, and choose to back up your Pictures folder. 5GB free, more with a Microsoft 365 subscription you may already pay for.

Turn this on and the majority of the problem is solved, permanently, without you thinking about it again.

Cloud backup is not a substitute for owning your photos. It is a second copy, kept somewhere your house is not. That is exactly what you need it for.

The second copy: something physical

Cloud alone makes some people uneasy, and there is a reasonable argument there: an account can be locked, a subscription can lapse, a company can change its terms.

So add a physical copy. Buy an external hard drive, which costs well under a hundred dollars for more space than you will ever fill, plug it into the computer, and copy your photos onto it.

Then unplug it and put it in a drawer. This matters more than people realise: a drive left permanently connected can be encrypted along with everything else if the computer is hit by ransomware. A drive in a drawer cannot.

Do this once or twice a year. Put it in the calendar.

Getting photos off the phone in the first place

This is the step where people get stuck.

The simplest way, if cloud backup is on, is that there is nothing to do. They are already off the phone.

By cable: plug the phone into the computer with its charging cable. On Windows, the phone appears in File Explorer like a USB stick, and you can drag the photo folder across. On a Mac with an iPhone, the Photos app offers to import automatically. You may need to unlock the phone and tap “Allow” or “Trust” first, which is the step most people miss.

By email or messaging, for a handful of photos. Fine for a few, hopeless for thousands.

Old photos in a shoebox

Prints, slides and negatives are a separate problem, and one worth taking seriously because they exist in exactly one copy.

Your phone is a decent scanner. Both Google (PhotoScan) and the standard camera work well for prints. Lay the photo flat, avoid direct light causing glare, and shoot straight down from above.

A flatbed scanner is better and slow. Fine for a few hundred; miserable for thousands.

A scanning service is worth the money for large collections. You post the box, they return it with a drive or a download.

Do the irreplaceable ones first: weddings, parents, grandparents, anything where the print is the only copy in existence.

Sorting them out

Once everything is in one place, the next complaint is being unable to find anything.

Modern photo apps are genuinely good at this now. You can search Google Photos or Apple Photos for beach, dog or 2019 and get sensible results without having labelled anything, because the software recognises what is in the picture.

Beyond that, two habits help enormously:

• Use albums for the events that matter, rather than trying to organise everything.
• Mark favourites as you go. Then the good ones are one tap away instead of buried among four hundred near-identical shots of the same sunset.

Do not attempt to organise thirty thousand photos in one sitting. Nobody has ever finished that job.

What good looks like

When you are done:

• Photos back up automatically from the phone without you thinking about it
• A copy exists on a drive in a drawer, updated once or twice a year
• The irreplaceable old prints have been scanned
• You can find a photo from 2014 in under a minute

That is a couple of hours of work in total, and it protects something genuinely irreplaceable.

If you would rather not do it alone

This is one of the most common things I get asked for, and it is very satisfying to sort out, particularly when somebody has years of photographs sitting on one ageing phone.

It is usually a single session. Get in touch if you would like a hand with it.