Managing the photos on your phone

In this age of instant photography, a lot of our photo memories end up somewhere on our phones and then we run out of room. We take more pictures than ever before - Over 1 trillion photos were taken in 2017 - But what do we do with them?

I ran into that problem this past month when I didn't want to bring my big camera gear while on vacation. My biggest issue was storage. All my vacation photos were shot on my phone. I also like to retouch my photos right on my phone before I upload them to the cloud and towards the end of the vacation, I was struggling to find room for new photos on my phone.

Most of us who take pics on our phones, risk jamming our phone memory and end up getting a cloud account. While this is a great tool, that account also gets full and we are back at square one. How do we manage this problem?

What should you do with all those photos and how?

in this series, I will talk about: Space managing on your phone, Organizing your photos off your phone, and preserving those special ones for viewing and sharing. this first article will cover Space Managing on our phones

Managing photo space on our phones

Saving space on your phone

1- After an outing or a day of taking pictures, scroll through your photos and mark the ones that jump at you as favorites. These are usually the ones that give you the warm feeling you had when you were taking the pictures.

2- Scroll through again and remove some of the favorites that are not that great and/or add some that you may have missed the first time. So now that you did this twice, you can be pretty sure that the rest are not top notch and can be deleted. Go through again a third time if necessary, just to put your mind at ease.

3- Delete the photos not marked as favorites. It is always a bit scary but you will learn to trust your instincts. This is what I do. It has taught me to take less photos in the first place after I realized how many photos of the same thing I ended scrolling through.

4- Now, backup the remainder photos (the favorite ones) to your cloud account. When your photos are backed up, if you need more room on your phone for new pictures, you can delete a lot of pictures knowing you have them backed up on the cloud.

Managing the cloud.

If your cloud account is set to back up all your photos automatically, you will have to do that selection step again on your cloud account. I like to set my backup to "manual" or "Off" so I backup only after I have made my selections. The benefits of manual back up are 1. Only my favorites will be backed up 2. I do the work only once, and 3. I save space on the cloud too. The risk to setting your backup to manual is that you might forget to backup. So if you delete photos from your phone, they may not be backed up yet and you may loose them.

You can set your backup to "manual backup" or "Off" in your settings. When on "manual backup" or on "off" , don't forget to go into your settings and turn on the "backup now" button, or on Android turn "on" the "Backup & Sync" switch when you want to back up your photos.

I like to retouch my favorites on my phone. I retouch only the best ones and I use an app called Snapseed. Snapseed is a photo-editing application produced by Nik Software, now owned by Google, for iOS and Android that enables users to enhance photos and apply digital filters. Then, I backup to the cloud.

I sincerely hope this first step into better managing your photos helps you !

In my next Blog, I will talk about organizing your photos on and off your phone.

Let me know if you have questions in the comments and please share this with someone you think might like it!

Until next time!

Desiree