Remember the good old days of film when you loaded a roll into your camera, took photos until it was full, took it to be developed, and enjoyed your precious memories in print a week later? Those days have been replaced with unlimited shots leading to thousands of photos living on a device that you can access at any time. While this sounds amazing, it can quickly become overwhelming when it comes to safeguarding these images and enjoying them instead of holding them hostage in digital land.

Here are the 3 main steps to follow to ensure your phone photos are not only safe from disaster but enjoyed for years to come.
Step One- Make sure your phone photos are being automatically backed up using Google photos
Just about everyone these days has a Gmail address. If you don’t, what are you even doing?
If you are happy with your current email provider, you can still create a Google account. You don’t have to get a Gmail address. If you don’t currently have an account, here is a quick tutorial to set one up (it’s super easy).
Once you’ve done that, download the Google Photos app to your phone and sign in when prompted. Now, let’s get the photos from your phone to your account. You should be prompted to do so when you sign into the app. You can also click the circle in the upper right corner and click ‘Backup”. All you have to do is set it to auto backup and all the photos and videos on your phone will begin uploading. Any new photos or videos you take with your phone are almost immediately after they are taken and can be accessed from your phone, computer, tablet, or anywhere! This way, if you ever lose your phone or it becomes inoperable, your photos are safely backed up on the cloud and will be there when you sign in on a new phone.
Step Two- Organize them on your desktop computer
Instead of simply having your photos living in Googleland, let’s make sure we have access to them in an organized spot so they’re easy to find.
On your computer’s desktop, create one general folder and name it something like “Phone Photos” where all of your photos will live. Start by deciding how you want to categorize that will make sense to you.
For example-
Personal Photos>2023>March
or
Personal Photos>2016>Winter>Christmas
From your computer, go to Google Photos, scroll to what year you want to start with, see what event/month you can break the first batch into, and select all photos that correspond to it. Then, back on your computer, create a new folder within that year’s folder with that event/month (i.e. all photos from Dec 25th or all photos from April). When everything is selected, go to the 3 dots in the upper right-hand corner and click Download. It will download to a folder on your computer
(note: the folder will be what’s called a “zipped” folder. Don’t panic, all you do is click “extract all” and they will open in a new window)
Now select all of the photos and drag them into the folder you created for them. Congrats! Your first photos are now on your computer! You can go back and delete the zipped and empty folders so it doesn’t take up space on your hard drive.
Now if you need to delete photos from your phone, you know they live safely on your computer.
Step 3- Printing Them Out
I highly recommend getting some photo boxes to organize and store your printed photos. You can also put your favorites in a traditional slip-in album. Online printers like Snapfish and Shutterfly are always having sales on bulk 4×6 printing (I usually get mine for $0.19 or less with free shipping. You can upload an entire folder from your computer or just pick and choose the favorites that you want to print out. These websites are very user-friendly and you can create folders here that correspond to the ones on your computer to keep it simple.
One last note- Let’s talk long-term storage. While prints are great, there are still things that can happen- they get lost in a move, the basement gets flooded, or God forbid, a fire. You want to know that no matter what happens, your memories are safe. This is where online backups come in. Not only for photos, but any important documents you keep on your computer are stored and can be retrieved at any time. They are simple to set up and work in the background backing up any new files you put on your computer. The one I use puts a little green dot next to every file that is safely backed up so I know it’s working.
The top 3 companies to use for this are:
Carbonite
Backblaze
CrashPlan
Most of these cost between $60-80/year. Small price to pay for peace of mind.
And there you go- your photos are now not only off your phone, but will hopefully soon be printed out and enjoyed the way they should be! Breaking this process down into chunks and doing a little each week or month can make it more manageable and less overwhelming, but each step gets you closer to having one less worry in the back of your mind when it comes to preserving your precious memories.