Tired of your photos getting too large for your iPhone and iCloud? Here’s a better way.

Our Apple techs hear it all the time.  “My iPhone has no more space.”  That’s because photos build up past the cap of your storage space on your iPhone and iCloud.  It seems that even if you have space on your iPhone, Apple is still begging for you to increase your iCloud storage.

The goal of backing up your photos is met with iCloud, but the constant challenge of making space on your iPhone because your photos are stuck there is not.  The Apple support folks really never solved the issue of where to put your files on your iPhone once they’ve been backed up.  Eventually, you run out of space.

In the past, I used to recommend just connecting a USB cable from your computer to your iPhone and manually copy over the photos.  This does work to alleviate your phone space.  However, it leaves for a bit of clutter and confusion with where to now dump your extra photos on your computer.  Well, you could certainly just delete them perhaps knowing they are safely on iCloud.  With that, you don’t have an easy way to access your photos on the go.

For the past year, I’ve found the perfect solution for everyday photo management.  Google!  Yup, I use Google Photos and it truly has the best online backup and management features.  The best part of it is it will verify that your photos have indeed backed up online and then can delete those photos from your iPhone.  This is just an option as you don’t have to select this if paranoid.  If you don’t want to, there’s a one-click button that will allow you to remove photos that have already been backed up.  I just did this the other day when my iPhone got filled up to capacity.

I also like that for storing photos online, Google is cheap.  You can either use what your free Gmail account already gives you which could be 10 – 40GB for free.  Or if you need more space, it costs $1.99/month for 100GB or $9.99/month for 1TB.  Pretty reasonable pricing.

So, how does this all work?

1. Download Google Photos for iOS.
2. Log in with your normal Google credentials.
3. Back up and sync for the first time.
4. Go into Settings to set if you want to just sync over WiFi; remove photos on phone after backing up; and other cool features

There you have it. Now, there’s no need or reason to complain about a lack of space on your iPhone. If you still need help because you’re unsure how to do this on your own, feel free to have one of our iPhone / Computer Technicians come visit you by scheduling an onsite computer service visit online.