I occasionally download my photos to my own personal storage device. I usually do this when I start receiving numerous reminders that my i-phone storage is full.
Downside of my personal storage is that the photos do not keep all the back-up data. I know the date the photo is taken, but not necessarily the exact location.
I don’t like having photos stored in the cloud. Can I lose my back-up? Yes. I try to have a secondary back-up as well, but don’t do that as often as I should. Frankly, I have so many digital photos, I’m not sure ultimately why I’m saving all of them.
Related to this, last week I wanted to download photos from my iPhone to my laptop hard drive. Partly because my iCloud was full, partly because I wanted to build the holiday card and calendar. So I did NOT want the pictures to stay in the cloud, I just wanted them on the hard drive (and also on a flash drive).
You used to just be able to connect the phone to the computer and transfer photos to any file on the computer. But I couldn’t figure out a way to do that. I could ONLY seem to transfer them into my OneDrive… which was ALSO FULL. And then when I transferred them over, they all got dated as of the date/time of the transfer, not when they were taken. So to deal with the 99% full OneDrive I transferred them in small batches, like “August 2024” pictures so I would know when they were taken and then move them from the OneDrive folder on the laptop to a different folder, and then deleted them off the phone and the OneDrive. It was the most ridiculous time consuming labor intensive thing.
I tried to google for suggestions for other ways to do this, and nothing. I guess I’m going to increase OneDrive storage, as that seems to be the limiting factor for me (and everyone else with phones on my plan - we’re all getting annoying pop up messages).
But that still leaves me with the annoying problem of how to download pictures from my phone to my hard drive. Any suggestions for how to do this better next time? I want to have a few external backups that aren’t cloud based, so I expect to do this again.
There is no need for you to use the Google app. DIL can create an shared album in Google Photos on her Android phone or computer and share it with you. Numerous ways to do it; see the link below. And you don’t need to join the album to view it; simply click on the sharing link anytime you want to view the album.
Or perhaps “GD pics” means “Google Drive pics” and not “granddaughter pics”? In which case tell your DIL to use Google Photos which is explicitly designed for easy sharing of pictures and albums.
@abasket - I have way more photos and videos on my phone than you do. How much storage does your phone have? I have 128 GB and am almost at the limit - happens every vacation.
I use google photos - gave up on the deleting/trying to save space idea a few years ago and it’s been the best thing for me. I pay a 100$ for the year and all of us share the storage. And we have several hundred GB of data. The other cool thing is that I was able to upload all the old digital pictures (going back to circa 2000) to google photos - it took a while to do this, but now in a couple of clicks, I can pull up any old photo!
I plan to digitize my older albums and move them over too - when I have time! Might have to wait until retirement though…
What we like about having the Google app is that we get notifications whenever she adds photos. No need for her to text us to say, “Hey I just added Halloween photos” or “GD was being silly today, go check out the pics!” It’s more efficient and more fun than just trying to remember to go check the album every few days/week. What I DISLIKE is that Google requires me to connect my iCloud Photos to their app in order to use it.
I have the $2.99/month plan for ICloud and I have a huge amount of photos and videos (25k/1500). Yes I need to purge! Checking my Google app, I have Back-up turned off. That’s why I can have so many more photos than @abasket but not be out of space yet (but I’m close and do get warnings.)
Haha… I just told some friend’s this today. My wife buys Google storage. I don’t.
It took me 2 hours to delete on Gmail all those promotion and social tab stuff. Then I went to storage, inbox and unchecked those.
I went into my email and put in search words of emails I get a lot like NY times. I don’t need those emails from like 2015… Lol. Kept doing that with things I still want to get emails from. But deleted years worth of crap.
Then went to the photos since these are the largest files. Do I really need 10 pics of the same flower? There are reasons I took these pics but looking back on it, I don’t need them anymore. So many screen shots that I guess were important at the time. Lol.
For the totally lazy people out there… Haha, you can also make a new Gmail account. Call it back up. Transfers everything there from your old account (current account), then just use your current account till you fill it up once again. Actually this was a tip online I found months ago. I have 2 Gmail accounts and only one gets totally filled up until yesterday, when I took 2 hours out of my life to delete stuff as mentioned above. 2 hours to recover 7 gigs!! Do this when you have your morning coffee ’’
I bit the bullet and just bought extra Google storage today. Paid an annual fee - $18.99 for a year - the timing was just right in that life is really busy right now and I just wanted this problem off my plate! Maybe sometime in the next year I decide to not store photos on this drive and won’t need the bigger storage anymore - but for today, a couple clicks and I don’t have to see that annoying message anymore!!!
