Help please I need to back up my photos

[waterlily200]

I am a compulsive photo taker, well since DD was born and now have filled both the 32 GB on my Samsung Note 3 and the 32 GB on the memory card I added to it.
So I need to back up my photos so I can make room. I have a external hard drive which I can use with the laptop to transfer my photos from the phone but I would prefer to do this wirelessly.

Advice please:-
Wireless External hard drive or media sharer????

All help much appreciated.

You could trying using a NAS. Western Digital do a low cost 1TB and 2TB versions, which then have an app which runs on some devices like.

Not sure how easy it is to upload photo from device to NAS though. May give it a try.

Just tried it, remotely (so not even on the home wifi).
iOS WD App (My Cloud) lets you select individual photos from photostream and has a Select All option.

Something that might work a bit better once you have transferred your existing photos, would be to have a DropBox account. The DropBox account on Android and IOS will auto upload images. Then say once a month, you could transfer images to your NAS for local storage (would need to use laptop to do that I think, two file windows open and drag/drop).

My Dropbox is full but will look into NAS.

Thank you! I'm so worried I'll lose them.

I've upgraded the storage on my Dropbox as I like the fact that it automatically backs up my phone and laptop photos. Think it was £70 for 1TB of storage for a year.

There are other free cloud storage services, Amazon and Google.

It's worth backing up to google photos just for the auto awesome and the google stories.

Old fashioned idea but I've started to cherry pick the best pictures from each year and put them into albums, then back up the rest onto a disc or usb storage.

Google Drive pricing has just been dropped to $1.99 a month for 100 GB, so if you use something like the Samsung, you presumably already have a Google account, so you could cheaply store everything there.

For the longer term, do you have any laptop or PC which you could use to burn a DVD with a set of photos. A DVD can hold over 4 GB so a pack of 10 from a supermarket (I think I saw some in Lidl or Aldi) would hold 'permanent' copies of 32 GB quite easily (and would give you chance to review them, as it makes sense to have Folders such as 2014-Sicily etc etc for holidays, birthdays, etc)... since you'd need to cut down to ~4 GB "chunks" to plan what to store on each DVD.

Cindy34 - "Not sure how easy it is to upload photo from device to NAS though. May give it a try."

A simple FTP app should be able to help.

I've tried X-plore but that only offers certain online services like Box, Google Drive, OneDrive MediaFire, Dump Truck, Dropbox

If you are a bit geeky, then using FTP Cafe (Android app) will allow file transfer over WiFi from the phone to your NAS box (in my case, the Buffalo NAS is on IP 10.0.10.200 but you might have an IP like 192.168.x.x depending on your network... Often good to use a static IP for a NAS - depends on the features and options available via the web control panel for the NAS, or any Windows/ Mac software they provide).

Flickr has just made it easier to upload photos - it will take all the photographs from your computer in one fell swoop. I was thinking of leaving Flickr as the organisation of photographs on the site was a pain - but they are testing a new system which automatically stores them by date taken. Useless for aged scanned photos but brilliant for digital.

Google photos now offers unlimited storage for free!

LSP - do be aware that while free, the free storage puts restrictions on the size of images, and will lower the quality. If you have a 13 to 25 Mpixel camera and take high quality images, then saving them in the free storage would drop the quality until they are like 2-3 Mpixel and therefore could lose detail if you wanted an A3 poster printed from the photo at a later date.

For those who intend to use MS Office 365, the plan is for the MS OneDrive cloud storage (associated with an Outlook.com / Live / Hotmail account) to become "unlimited" while you have the subscription to Office 365.

Free versions of Office 365 for small tablets and both Android and iOS (iPhones) plus Mac and Windows (and even linux, I think) laptops will be coming out over the next few months. Upgrading from Office 365 Personal (1 system) to Office 365 Home (5 licences) will be cheap, but only Windows systems will have the full set of applications (so Access database not on Apple etc).