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How I back up my photos on Android
Recently, my wife ran into that timeless issue where Android warned her she’d gobbled up most of the storage on her device. The majority of the files consuming the storage were photos.
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My wife takes a lot of photos. When she informed me her storage was filling up, I had to help her get the pictures off her device, while keeping the images in her Google account (in photos.google.com). That process was easy. You select all the photos you want to remove from your phone and tap “Delete from device”:
To delete photos only from your phone (and not your Google account), tap “Delete from device”.
Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
The above process will delete the photos (or videos) from your phone but not your account. However, if you just delete a photo, it is removed from both the phone and account.
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Okay, that’s great. But what about backing the pictures up? Yes, they are automatically backed up to your Photos account, and, generally speaking, the app does a good job. However, if you have photos that are considerably more important than others, you might want to have a backup for your backup.
Here’s what I do.
Backing up your photos to Google Drive
What you’ll need: The only thing you’ll need for this task is an Android phone connected to a valid Google account.
The first thing to do is create a directory in Google Drive that will house your photos. Open your Drive account, click New, and then tap Folder. Give the folder a name, such as Photo Backup.
Open the Photos app on your phone. Then select all the important photos you want to back up outside of Photos. If you long-press one photo, you can go through the pictures and tap to select others.
With all the photos selected, tap the Share icon and then, from the picker, select Google Drive.
Here’s the tricky part. You don’t want to save the photos to the root of your Google Drive account. Instead, tap the dropdown and then, when prompted, select the new folder you created in your Google Drive account. Once you’ve done that step, tap Save and the photos will start uploading.
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Here’s a warning: do this task when connected to a wireless network. If you back up many files, you don’t want to consume too much of your data plan.
Always make sure you select a folder and don’t just share them to the root of your Google Drive account.
Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
What if you want to move away from Google?
If you want to walk away from as many Google services as possible, here’s what I suggest.
On several occasions, I’ve either deployed or signed up for third-party hosting of a Nextcloud instance. With that service on my home network or accessible from a third party, I install the Nextcloud app on my Android phone and set it up to automatically back up photos.
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To make sure photos are backed up to your Nextcloud instance, you need to open the app (making sure to log in to your Nextcloud account), go to Settings > Auto Upload, then enable camera options for either (or both) photos and videos by tapping the cloud icon for each type.
The cloud icon is directly to the left of the three-dot menu button.
Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
Once you’ve done this step, your selections will automatically back up to your Nextcloud account. Check your Nextcloud account to ensure the photos have been backed up (they’ll be in a folder called “Instant Upload”).
If the process works as planned, you can disable photo backup to your Google account from within Photos > Settings > Backup. To disable backup to Google Photos, tap the On/Off slider until it’s in the Off position and you’re done.
If you want to disconnect photo backup from Google Drive, this is the place to do it.
Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
And that, my friends, is how I back up photos from my Android device.
