Your photos and videos are precious memories, and you don’t want to lose them. Here are four mostly-free services you can use to automatically backup your photos and videos and access them from anywhere.
If you’re like most people, your phone is your primary camera. As such, it contains highlights of your life or your children’s lives, and you don’t want to lose those memories. If your phone gets lost, stolen, or broken, all of your photos and videos may go with it. But there are a few services out there, most of which are free, where you can safely store your photos and videos in the cloud. One of the best parts about cloud storage is you can pull up those photos or easily share them from anywhere.
Google Photos
Google Photos is one of the best and easiest ways to keep your Android photos safe. Most devices get unlimited storage of photos and videos, with a small caveat: your photos and videos will be saved at a “high resolution,” instead of the original resolution. Google uses machine learning to decrease the size of these photos and videos while still retaining a high level of detail and clarity—most users won’t even notice the difference. The one exception here is for Pixel phones (minus the 3a), which get free, unlimited storage at the original resolution.
If you don’t have a Pixel phone and aren’t happy with the “high quality” option, Google allows you to store photos and videos at their original quality using the available storage space on your Google Drive account. The free plan offers 15 GB, which seems like a lot, but if you’re a shutterbug, you could suck up that space quickly. You can, however, purchase more Drive storage.
Aside from the benefit of offering free, unlimited storage, Google Photos also comes with an Assistant that can help you get more out of your photos. It can automatically suggest filters for your photos—but note the original photo is not affected. It can show you memories like “On this day two years ago” kinds of stuff. Plus, Google Photos allow you to search for faces it recognizes are close to you (if you don’t find that too creepy). It can also search for places or things like “New York” or “statues.”
Your phone should have Google Photos pre-installed, but if not, you can download the app from the Google Play store. Open the app, and you’ll be asked to sign in to your Google account. By default, it will use the main Google account on the phone. You’ll also see the upload and storage settings. By default, it uses the “High quality” option (again, save for Pixel phones, which get unlimited storage at the original quality) and will use Wi-Fi data only. To change those settings, tap “Change Settings.”
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