I’m sure you are take a lot of photos with your phone, be it of your kids, your pets, yourself or the food you’re about to eat (hopefully that’s less of a fad now). Hopefully you never lost your phone, but even without loosing your phone there are ways to loose or erase photos accidentally. I’ll cover what I’m doing and what you can do to make sure your precious memories are safe.

iOS makes it easy by even offering a built-in feature called iCloud, which after it’s enabled will back up images to Apple’s servers. One minor downside to this is you’ll need to pay for the higher tier storage, but at $2 per month for 200GB of storage, it’s absolutely worth it. That’s only $24 a year, most people have more in their piggy banks.

Another potential negative is if you have more than one iPhone on your account, lets say husband, wife and maybe a child, and everyone has iCloud backup enabled, everyone will have a copy of what mom took and vice versa. It syncs among all devices no matter which device took the photo. Im hoping Apple will give us an option to disable that. One option to get around this is to get a separate Apple ID, but that’s not feasible for everyone.

Positive side effect of iCloud backup is more storage on your iPhone. Since older photos only have a thumbnail stored on your phone and only download images when you view them.

Ok, if you’re on Android, these next ones will be applicable to both systems.

• Google Photos (will be paid in June 2021)

• Dropbox (has free tier)

• Microsoft OneDrive

• Adobe Creative Cloud

• Amazon Photos

Out of all those, I use iCloud and Dropbox. Why 2 services? Well you never know, plus as a photographer I’m used to backing up to multiple locations and services anyway. Better safe than sorry.

So go ahead and give any of those a try, you won’t regret it when you drop your phone in the water while boating in Lake Tahoe and realize you still have a great photo of what you had for lunch at a fancy Asian restaurant 2 nights before, safely backed up online, or photos of your kids for that matter.