Our favourite ways to snap, store, and backup family photos
If you are parents, we would hazard a guess that both your mobile phones are filled with photos and videos of your children. We have heard several upsetting stories about how people either lost their phones or had their photos deleted before backing them up. The need for a sustainable solution to back up all our photos and videos is definitely high on our priority list, as these precious memories cannot be recovered.
We are both iPhone users and although each of our phones have a relatively large storage space, we know it will run out one day! We did not like the idea of having to pay on an ongoing basis for iCloud, the Apple storage solution, as this can get costly over time.
So here are our favourite ways to shoot, save and backup our precious family photos.
1. Camera with a WiFi SD card
Even though we live in the smartphone era, we cannot run away from the fact that the photo quality from standalone cameras is much sharper than pictures shot with a smartphone. We previously used a Casio camera, which served us well for the past four years. However, with two kids now and an exploding bag when we go out, we recently purchased a sleeker and lighter Canon IXUS, which was a great investment as we carry it everywhere to take family pictures. We also purchased an SD card with a WiFi function so that even away from home, we can still transfer and share photos from the camera to the mobile phone to share instantly.
2. Google Photos backup
If you want a fuss-free way to backup all photos directly from your phone, the Google Photos app is our number one choice. It seamlessly backs up all photos, and has a value-add that we both love: It creates photo montages independently, links together snippets of existing videos to form a montage, and you can choose whether to save or delete these Google ‘creations’. Like Facebook, it also brings up ‘today in history’ photos and videos that you can use to reminisce over precious events months or years ago. Best of all? There is unlimited storage. To us, the only drawback is that the photo quality stored is somewhat lower than the original, but I suppose we can’t have everything.
3. Photo transfer app
One of our biggest gripes about the direct iPhone photo transfer via the USB cable to the laptop is that it only shows the photos from the Camera Roll taken in order, but does not show the albums created on the phone. Instead, we downloaded the Photo Transfer App via the App Store, which links the phone to the laptop via WiFi, from which you can view all created photo and video albums on the iPhone, download them to the computer or hard drive, then delete them directly from the computer if needed. This is our favourite app for transferring photos and videos.
4. iMyFone
This tool is our latest discovery, after we realised that Mummy’s phone had excess media taking up a significant amount of space, but not finding a way to delete them via the phone or even through iTunes. After a lot of Google searching, we finally found the iMyFone tool, which basically scans the entire phone and gives the option to clear up useless files clogging up the phone. It can help to compress photos while backing up the originals to the computer, and also help to delete large files and unwanted apps. We found the problem only through this tool and it helped to release a crazy amount of space: 101gb in total! We were sceptical at first about having to buy the tool, but it was perhaps the best US$19.95 (S$27) spent to date. If you are constantly griping about your iPhone having insufficient space, this is definitely the tool to have. iMyFone also has an option to recover lost iPhone data, although we did not purchase this.
5. External storage/thumb drive
If you are someone who likes to have all your photos and videos on hand and can’t bear to delete anything from your phone even though there is insufficient storage space, purchasing a separate storage thumb drive is one option. From our Amazon searches, there are various storage sizes available, ranging from 32gb to 256gb. You can back up the entire phone contents onto the thumb drive directly, and it is easy enough to carry around so you can have all your media on hand, wherever you go.
So there you have it – our favourite ways to snap and backup our photos so we can keep them for years to come. We now have peace of mind that should anything happen to our phones, our precious photos and videos will not be lost forever!
Mummy and Daddy Daycare are the pseudonyms of a Singaporean husband and wife who are raising two young boys aged four and one, nicknamed Barnacles and Kwazii from the children’s Octonauts series. Get into the minds of this couple who describe parenthood as a lifetime adventure – you are always learning something new! Whoever said parenting was a walk in the park?
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