iPhone photos and storage

What do you do with the photos on your iPhone?

We all take photos with our iPhones. I use mine a lot more than I thought I would. It's great for those quick shots you want to share or just keep for reference. What do you do with the photos once you have shared them? Do they accumulate on your phone until your phone is full? Do you back them up?

Photo Stream is a great first step to saving those photos you want to keep. But it is not prefect. First off, you need to make sure you an an iCloud account. iCloud is free but needs to be set up on your devices and computers. Next, you need to know that Photo Stream only keeps the last 1000 photos that you have taken. If you rely on Photo Stream to keep all your photos, you will be losing them as you take more photos.

There are many ways to back up and store your photos. iMore just posted some iPhone storage options and compared them. Read the article and take your pick. Whatever you choose, be sure to maintain it. You can put a repeating task on your to-do list or set a reminder.

Once a month, I open iPhoto and import my Photo Stream photos. Because I use the same iCloud account on my iPhone, my dad's iPhone, and my boys' iPods, all of their photos are in the stream. (They stay in the stream unless they are specifically deleted.) At this point, I could label and add keywords to photos. Perhaps delete the truly bad photos. However, I only use iPhoto as an easy way to back up my Photo Stream. I use Adobe Lightroom to store and maintain my photos. I am working on a post about my Lightroom workflow.

One problem with Lightroom is that it does not import png files. Screenshots you take with your iPhone are saved in png format. In the past, I have opened these files in Snapseed  and saved them which converts them to jpg format. Another way is to use Image Capture which is a native MacOS app. You can choose where the images will go and delete them from your device with just one click.

I try not to keep many photos in my iPhone Camera Roll. Currently there are 48 which is too many for me. I do not like to scroll through to find what I am looking for. I prefer to take the time to set up albums. You can do this on the phone but is time consuming. An easier way is to set up folders on your computer. I have a folder called iPad photos. You can name this anything you want. I know these photos have been saved at 1024x1024 which is optimum viewing on my iPad 1. Then I set up folders for whatever I want to reference on my devices. I have family photos I love, some digital cards and layouts I have created, my recent Lego photos. Then I go to iTunes and, click on my device then over to Photos. I click the box Sync Photos from and Choose Folder and browse for iPad Photos. Then I can choose which albums on want on each device. I save my scrapbook layouts to my iPad since they are easy to view there. I save less on my iPhone since I have less room for storage. My photos are organized and I can easily find and share them.

However you do it, remember to backup and your iPhone photos.