Everybody’s a photographer today, even if fewer people are buying digital cameras now than they did 10 years ago. An estimate from 2017 calculated that people would take a whopping 1.2 trillion photos that year, most of them via smartphones. Sure, people with formal photography businesses will still buy “real” cameras, but most other people don’t see a need for it.
People are taking more photos and videos than ever, which means they’re recording their lives on a scale that previously seemed unimaginable. But people only have so much storage space on our phones. If your Apple or Android phone is overflowing with images, you need a plan. Keep reading for tips on what to do with all those photos you’re taking.
Use the cloud
You’ve probably heard that the cloud is a great option for storing your photos. But maybe you’ve resisted because you don’t want to forget if your photo is on the cloud, on your phone, or somewhere else entirely. But today’s cloud photo storage options are a lot more intuitive than you might realize.
It’s possible for you to store all your photos in one place without doing a lot of extra legwork. And getting those photos into one place where you can organize them is half the battle. Phones are good for taking photos, sure, but they’re not always the best place for organizing and sharing those photos.
Let’s say you attended a wedding where guests were encouraged to take photos with their smartphones. You got some great shots of the bride and groom’s first dance together, but you aren’t sure how to share them. After all, not everyone at the wedding is on social media. Cloud photo storage lets you create an album and send a link to the newlyweds. If you want, you can even create a shared album that can accept contributions from multiple wedding attendees. It’s an elegant solution to an age-old problem.
Cloud storage isn’t free, but it will save you a lot of time and stress in the long run. It’s one of your best options if you’re serious about archiving all those memories that now exist on your smartphone’s camera roll.
Delete on a regular basis
This option definitely involves more time and energy than storing all your photos on the cloud. But if you don’t have room in your budget right now for extra photo storage, it might be your best bet. The good news is you might not have to agonize over each and every photo before deciding whether or not it should go in the trash bin. That’s because photos you delete will stay on your phone for another 30 days. To retrieve them, all you have to do is go to the “Recently Deleted” photo album and hit the recover button. That gives you a little more breathing room in the short-term.
But what if you’re going on vacation tomorrow and need to free up space now? In that case, you can go to the “Recently Deleted” album and kill off your photos for good. Be absolutely sure that you won’t want them back in the future, though. Sure, if you’re going on a vacation to Hawaii, it makes sense to have some extra room on your phone for photos of advanced surfing lessons and late night luaus, but deleting everything at once is not always ideal.
If trying to decide between pictures of your cat and pictures of your dog sounds like way too much work, you always have the option to fork over a few dollars for cloud storage. There are cheap cloud storage plans that get you less and high-end ones that get you a lot more. But if that’s not possible right now, you’ll have to go back to judging each photo individually.