Saving your memories is important to you, I know it is! So every time your phones memory fills up and you have to delete old photos to make room for new ones, you’re crying on the inside right? Oh, I totally feel your pain!
Guess what, though? I have a solution! …and it’s so easy! and it’s free! and I’m happy to share. This is what I do with my own photos:
Using Google Drive to backup your phone photos
You need a google username to participate in this, so if you don’t use gmail or have a google account sign up for one before you continue by clicking here.
1. Now that you have your account made, I want you to head to the app store on your phone (or play store for Android users), search for google drive, and download it!
…waiting…
2. Downloaded? Good. Open it up and sign in!
3. Once the Google Drive app opens up, you’ll see a blue circle with a plus (+) sign in it at the bottom of your phone screen. Click that button!
4. Okay, so here’s where things get a little tricky because this works differently if you’re an iPhone or an Android user. Follow the appropriate directions…
iPhone users:
Click the upload button, then click the words “photos and videos”. (You may get a window that asks for permission for this app to access your photos. If you want to do this, you have to click “OK”.) Your gallery images will open in different folders. Click “Camera Roll” to open up that gallery and you’ll have to click on each image you want to save into your drive individually. A little check mark will appear over top of each image to signify that it has been chosen. Once you have them all selected, click “Upload” at the top right of your screen. At this time you will be brought back into your Google Drive app and see a task bar of your images being uploaded. Once they’re all uploaded you’re done!
Android users:
Click the upload button which will bring you to a window that has a bunch of folders. (You may get a window that asks for permission for this app to access your photos. If you want to do this, you have to click “OK”.) Click to open your image gallery. Your image gallery is filled with many folders, such as “Camera”, “Instagram”, “Screenshots”, “Downloads”, etc. Click on one of those folders to open it and then you’ll have to click on each image you want to save into your drive individually. A check mark will appear over top of each image to signify that it has been chosen. Once you have them all selected, click “Upload”. At this time you will be brought back into your Google Drive app and will see each of your images uploading. Once they’re all uploaded you’re done!
Alrighty, so how easy was that??
Now that your images are saved into Google Drive you can delete them from your phone, knowing they are safe inside of your google drive.
How to get your photos out of google drive and onto a computer
Lets say you want to put these images on your computer, which you probably might, you can do that easily too!
1. Turn on your computer/laptop and head over to www.google.com and sign in (top right corner) with your username and password.
2. Once you’ve signed in, you’ll see 9 squares in a little cube at the top right hand corner of your internet browser. Click that icon, and you’ll see these icons drop down:
3. Click the “Drive” icon. Your Google Drive will open and you’ll see all of your images! Yay!
4. Right click on one of your images and click “download” to download that image to your computer. You can do this to all your photos individually, or click on a whole bunch of them at once and download them at the same time.
***I highly recommend keeping your images saved digitally in more than one place (like in google drive, but also on your laptop and then also on your husbands computer) for extra safe storage in case something happens! You can never be too careful with your memories, right?
Other Uses for Google Drive
*Not only is this method great for when you need to clean up your phones storage and make room for new images, but it’s also a really great backup method in case you break or lose your phone (i.e. toddler throws phone out window while driving down 95). Have you ever thought about what would happen to all your photos if your phone broke? Let’s not even go there!
*You can store more than just photos. Save anything you want in there! (videos, documents, anything!)
*Google Drive is really convenient because you can access the files inside of it from anywhere – any computer, tablet, or phone.
I hope this blog post was helpful to you. Lets save those photos, those memories, and keep them forever! If you need any help, I’d be happy to get this set up for you at our next portrait session. Just let me know. I know how important those photos are to you. Leave a comment and let me know if this was helpful.