iPhone or Android: Knowing What You've Got
Okay so before we can back anything up, you need to know what kind of phone you're actually holding. This sounds obvious. It is not obvious to about a third of the room every single time, and that's fine, that's why we're starting here.
Flip your phone over, or just look at the home screen. If you see a grid of square-ish icons and one button (or no button, if it's newer) on the bottom, and the settings app is gray gears, you've probably got an iPhone. If you see more of an arrow-shaped back button and the settings icon looks more like a wrench or a slider, you're on Android. I know that's not a very technical way to describe it. I'm not a very technical person. I know which button to press and that's about the extent of it.
Here's the bigger thing though, and I say this every class: iPhone and Android back up completely differently, and they use different words for the same stuff. If you're sitting next to someone with the other kind of phone, do not follow along on their screen thinking it'll match yours. It won't. I'll be honest, I'm an iPhone person through and through, so when we get to the Android side today I'm going to lean on whoever in the room has one figured out. That's not me being lazy, that's just me knowing my limits.
Find your cloud service (or lack of one)
iPhone folks: go to Settings, tap your name at the very top (it's got your picture or your initial), then tap iCloud. You're looking to see if Photos is toggled on already. A lot of people have it on without knowing, which is good news, but you still need to check because it's not automatic on every phone.
Android folks: open Settings, look for Google, then Backup, or sometimes it's under a separate Photos app under your account icon in the top corner. Google Photos is the standard one most Android phones lean on. Again, if this is confusing, that's normal, there's about four different paths depending on your phone brand and I'm not going to pretend I know all of them cold.
Either way, what you're checking for right now is simple: is there already a photo backup service tied to this phone, and is it turned on. Not organizing. Not fixing anything. Just finding it.
Check what's actually in there
Sooo here's where I want you to open your photo gallery app itself, not settings, and just scroll. Look at what's in there. Is it just pictures, or is it a mess of screenshots, a screenshot of a receipt, a meme your sister sent you, a photo of a whiteboard from a work meeting, all mixed in together?
I ask because this bit me hard the first time I set up my own backup. I turned everything on, felt very proud of myself, and then watched my cloud storage fill up with every single image my phone considered a "photo," which apparently includes every screenshot I've ever taken since 2016. Grocery lists. A screenshot of a text where Travis sent me a joke I wanted to remember. Receipts for returns. All of it got backed up right alongside actual pictures of my kids, because the phone doesn't know the difference between a memory and a receipt. I had to go learn that "photos" and "everything the phone thinks is an image" are two different categories, and most phones lump them together by default.
This is one of my hills, honestly. Screenshots are not photos. They shouldn't live in the same pile as your photos, because once they're mixed in you can't find anything, and your storage fills up with junk you didn't need to keep in the first place. We're not fixing that today. Today is just noticing it's there.
What you should know by the end of this lesson
- Which phone you have and roughly where its settings live
- Whether a cloud backup service exists on your phone already, and if it's on or off
- A rough sense of how much of your camera roll is actual photos versus screenshots and junk
That's it. That's genuinely the whole goal for today. I feel like people want to jump straight to organizing folders and I get it, it's the fun part, but if we skip this step you're organizing a mess you don't understand yet.
One real caution here: if your phone is older or you haven't updated it in a while, some of these settings menus might look different from what I'm describing, or might be buried under an extra tab. Don't force it or start tapping things at random hoping to find it. Just raise your hand and I'll come look with you.
Before next time
Just have your phone charged and sitting next to you at the start of next class, and take a peek at how full your storage is (Settings, then General, then iPhone Storage on iPhone, or Settings then Storage on Android). No need to do anything about the number. Just know it.