How to Backup Your iPhone and Camera Photos (The Simple & Easy way!)

Imagine that your phone or laptop crashes and you loose every photo you’ve taken over the last year (or longer). What are you thinking?

a) “no sweat! I know I’ve got a backup”

b) *insert panicking*

There are hard drive options, cloud options, programs that do it for you and how the heck do you get access to the images once you start using a program??

This is the topic that seems to intimidate everyone I know, and I can see why! We take thousands of pictures on our iPhones and then they just…live there? Permanently? Where to put them, how to keep them safe, what technology to use…it is intimidating! But the thing that adds the most stress is how IMPORTANT it is! We all fear what would happen if our phones or laptops crashed and we lost everything. There seems to be a lack of simple information anywhere on how to do this and how to do it easily. Over the last few months this topic has come up in numerous conversations and so I knew it was time to do a blog post!

As a professional photographer, backing up images safely was one of the FIRST things I focused on learning when I started my business and it was an uphill climb. Good news for you, I’ve sorted through all the options and come up with a simple, clean, effective method to organize images which I now use for both my business and personal images.

FEAR NO MORE. We are about to get your images safely organized and backed up.

* I use all Apple products so this guide refers to Mac, I’ll try to insert info about PC as I can*

Prep a Hard Drive

STEP 1: Purchase an External Hard Drive

I prefer to use an external hard drive to backup all my images and use cloud storage only as a secondary option. There are a couple reasons. I can organize the external hard drive exactly how I want, plug it into any computer, keep it in a fireproof safe, and know my images aren’t just *out on the internet* somewhere (I know that cloud options are “secure” but still- something to think about). It is a one time purchase, not a subscription, and I’ll never have to try and remember a login and password to get at my photos.

This is the hard drive I recommend and I’m going to show you how to set it up. If you have a minimal amount of photos 1-2 terabytes should be plenty. If you want to store many years and have a lot of images and videos I would go with 4-5 terabytes depending on how much $$ you want to spend. I have a 5tb that holds the past 6 years and has about 30% of the storage left.

STEP 2: Format the Hard Drive

The first time you use a brand new hard drive you will need to format it.

If you are using a PC, this video will walk you through doing this.

When you take it out of the package and plug it into your mac computer you will get this message

Time Machine is Apple’s backup software and I would *not* recommend using it. It is clunky and complicated to use (at least based on my last experience with it). Click “Don’t Use”

OPEN DISK UTILITY. I usually do this by hitting the space bar & command key and searching for it.

This is what you will see when it opens and you are going to click “Seagate Portable”

We are now going to erase and format this hard drive. This will delete everything currently on this hard drive so you want to make sure that you are viewing the new hard drive you plugged in (NOT anything that says Macintosh). “Seagate” on the left will be highlighted and you should be seeing the yellow icon and “Seagate Portable Drive” in the main window as in the picture above.

Click “Erase”

You will be now given the option to name it and pick the format. I named mine “Family Photos” but you could do the year, or whatever name you want.

For the format you are going to open the dropdown menu. If you are using only Apple products (I am) I would recommend using “Mac OS Extended Journaled”. If you need your hard drive to be compatible with both Mac AND Windows, I have read that ExFAT should be used, though I don’t have personal experience with this option.

Click “Erase” and it will begin formatting.

When it’s finished, click “Done”

As soon as it is done, you will likely get the same offer to use Time Machine. Again, hit “don’t use”.

STEP 3: Set up your folders

Now this is where we get to decide on some organization. You will create folders inside of folders inside of folders depending on how type A your personality is. As you are about to find out, mine is very.

While I’m setting this up I like to view things in column view. You can do that buy hitting the button I’ve circled in red.

Right click and choose “New Folder” to create your first folder. I like to organize my photos by year and then by event.

Here is what mine looks like all set up. I have a folder for the year, inside that is a folder for each event. I label them with a number indicating the month so that the events all go in order. I like this because when I’m looking for a specific event I can see the name at a glance. I don’t have to try and remember what month Meg and I went to Charleston.

I’ll throw in a miscellaneous “fall iphone” to catch all the random images that I want to keep but don’t have a specific “event” for.

You can create these folders as you begin organizing your images. Now let’s get those images off your phone!!! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Get your images off your phone

Let’s start with the most scary/overwhelming part, shall we? There is a way to do this SIMPLY, I promise. I would recommend doing this while watching a tv show (to calm your anxiety) and working on one month of images (or year if you have a lot of history saved on your phone) at a time. Don’t get overwhelmed, you’ve got this!

You have 2 simple options. Dump your entire iPhone gallery onto your hard drive and sort them from there, OR sort them while they are on your phone and import only the photos you want to keep onto your hard drive (this is what I do and would recommend). If you are currently in the habit of deleting unwanted iPhone photos from your phone and only keep your favorites to begin with, than option 1 might work great for you! If you have a lot of photos (or screenshots) on your phone currently that you do not need to keep, go with option 2.

OPTION 1: Dump them all.

If you are using a PC this article can walk you through the next steps

For Mac: Grab a computer and an iPhone charging cord. Plug your phone into the cord and the cord into the USB port on your computer.

Open the program “Image Capture”. It will likely open on its own but if it doesn’t hit the spacebar & command key and search for it. This will show you all the images on your phone.

Choose the folder you want to import these to. I recommend making a folder on your hard drive called “images to sort” and placing them there. Click “other”, find that folder” select it and click “import all”.

It will take a while to load, but they will all end up in this folder.

OPTION 2: Import only your favorites (recommended)

*I’m not sure how to do this with PC, you might need to go with option 1*

We are going to sort through your iPhone and select only the images you want to keep. In the photography world we call this “culling”.

I like to do this by flipping through my camera roll and hitting the heart button at the bottom of the screen when I get to one I want to KEEP.

Now going back to the grid view I will select all the images with hearts and click the share button. (you can also do this from inside the favorites folder)

Click “airdrop”

then tap the computer you would like to send them to. I recommend doing this about 20 images at a time.

These will all go to your Downloads folder on your mac. From there, drag them into the “images to sort” folder on your external hard drive.

You’ll notice that now you have a million photos saved to your favorites folder on your phone. No worries, you don’t need to go back through and “un-heart” all of them. I use this app to un-favorite all the images once I’m done.

Organize Your Photos Into Folders

Now it’s time to get those babies into folders.

This is pretty straightforward. I open one tab with the Hard Drive, one tab with the “images to sort” folder open in grid view. Click and drag them over, make folders as needed, and organize to your hearts content.

Remember not to overcomplicate it unless you want to. If you want to have one massive folder and dump all your pictures in there for the year, that’s fine! If it gives you peace of mind just to know they are backed up than you’ve accomplished the goal! I like sorting them into folders because (like I said) *type A over here*.

Cloud Storage

Like I said, my personal recommendation is only to use cloud storage as a secondary backup. There are pros and cons to using a hard drive vs cloud storage but there is the peace of mind that if the hard drive ever crashed/was lost/etc your photos would be safe in the cloud. For that reason I upload my entire hard drive (by selecting the yearly folders) to the cloud as an exact mirror of my external hard drive. If you choose to go this route, you will need to routinely upload new folders.

Another option would be to skip the external hard drive all together, create the folders how I showed you on your computer, and then upload from your computer to the cloud (rather than hard drive to cloud).

For my business I use BackBlaze because it offers the most storage (I utilize over 30 tb worth of wedding images and that number is only growing lol) at the lowest price. If you are a photographer I would hands down recommend this option, but it is more robust than most non-pros need!

A few other options are Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Photos or iCloud at varying price points.

YOU CAN DO THIS

You’ve got this!! Don’t get overwhelmed by the project, do it little bit by little bit. I would recommend making it a routine that you visit monthly or at least seasonally. Start today with where you are at at work on backing up past months/years/decades over time! Consider it part of your spring cleaning!