Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Automatically Save Photos Off Your Smart Phone


A common question I hear is "how do I share photos from my smart phone" or "how do I get photos off my smart phone?"


I say automatically and without wires, get ALL photos copied off your smart phone quickly and safely so they don't get accidentally deleted.


Many folks are very particular about organizing their photos and that's all well and good but getting them from the smart phone to the computer is a bigger struggle.

I strongly recommend using an online service and there are a few which I will list below. However, I was to stress that if you want ease and worry free, then invest just a little time to sign up for one of these services.

  1. Sign up online
  2. Install the software on your smart phone
  3. From your phone, turn on the setting to automatically upload to the service's Internet site

Facebook and Google+ stop at uploading photos to the cloud. Dropbox and SkyDrive actually synchronize those photos to your Mac or PC. However, Facebook and Google+ allow you to download those same photos back to your Mac or PC.  I strongly recommend one of these two services although Dropbox is my favorite.

All of the below services are FREE, however, additional storage space have a fee.
 


Go to App Settings / Synch Photos and turn this On. This allows ALL photos to go to Facebook. Once the photos are on Facebook, click here to see what else you can do.



From the Menu, choose Photos > Turn On at the lower left. There are other choices to fine tune your uploads like only doing this when on WiFi to avoid excessive data usage (I do this). Click here for more on Google+.



Within the Dropbox app, choose Settings > Turn On Camera Upload. You can choose WiFi only too if you wish. With these settings, all NEW photos will automatically upload to a folder called Camera Upload on Dropbox. This Camera Upload folder will then, AUTOMATICALLY, synchronize down to any of your computers (Mac or PC) if it has Dropbox installed there too. For more information about Dropbox and photos, click here.


Unfortunately, SkyDrive does NOT have an automatic synch at this time but it is easy enough to upload an entire list of photos from your smart phone to SkyDrive.
Within the SkyDrive app, touch the upward arrow to Upload Photos and Videos. Creating a SkyDrive account is a bit more cumbersome than all the others. For more information about using SkyDrive, click here.

NOTE: Dropbox and SkyDrive can synchronize documents in addition to Photos and Videos.

All of these services are available for Android, iOS and Windows Phones as well as Mac and PC.


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