Tech expert tips on phone photo protection, so the thousands of pics on your phone aren’t lost

With thousands of photos saved on our phones, many of us carry around our entire photo libraries in our pockets.

Technology journalist Chris Rowlands tells Boston 25 News while trusting the cloud to save those photos is easy, it’s not a guarantee that your memories are being protected.

“There are times when it doesn’t happen, whether you have a connectivity issue, photos aren’t backed up, then you lose your phone, they’re gone,” Rowlands said.

Rowlands says the phone companies want you to use their clouds, but storage space can become an issue.

“You get five gigabytes free with iPads. And that’s around 2000-2500 photos, you get more for free with Google Photos, you get about 15 gigabytes. And obviously, once you hit that limit, if you have, for example, 30,000 photos on your phone, you’re probably going to need to shell out a few dollars a month, basically to expand the storage capacity,” Rowlands said. He thinks that money could be worth it, especially if your family uses different types of devices and you want them all saved in one spot.

Amazon Photos offers unlimited photo storage for Prime customers.

Rowlands says it may be worth backing up photos in an old-school way as well. “It’s never a bad idea to have a second kind of physical copy of your photos on a hard drive,” he said. “Jump drives: Great idea. The only risk obviously, is they’re also quite small. So you can lose those almost as easily as the phone.”

Rowlands says apps like Backblaze and Flickr can help you with the backup process.

And if that all sounds too complicated and you’d rather just stick with the cloud, he recommends using two-factor authentication to protect yourself from potential hacks.

“It’s just that peace of mind thing, right? Because the whole thing of backing up is so that you know that your photos are safe. And so the cloud services that are out there are great, it actually is affordable. And it’s just a case of taking those steps to make it secure,” Rowlands said.

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