Why We Back Up First and Organize Later
Okay so before we do anything else in this class, I need you to understand the order we're doing things in, because people fight me on this every single time.
Backup first. Organizing later. Not the other way around.
I feel like everyone's instinct is to open their camera roll, see the disaster in there, and want to start fixing it right away. Making folders, deleting the bad ones, getting it pretty. I get it. But if your phone dies tonight before you've backed anything up, it doesn't matter how organized your folders were going to be. There's nothing left to organize.
So here's the actual order we're following, every week, no exceptions:
- Turn on auto-backup (we'll do this together today)
- Let it finish uploading everything, however long that takes
- Confirm it's actually working
- THEN, and only then, start sorting, deleting, naming things
Why this actually matters
I didn't used to think about this at all. I just took pictures and figured the phone was handling it somehow. It wasn't.
My mother-in-law Inez wanted the temple photos from when she and Travis got married, she wanted to get them printed for an anniversary thing. And I could not find them. I knew they existed. I knew they were on my phone somewhere. But they were buried under about two years of screenshots, memes, pictures of receipts, a hundred pictures of the kids' school flyers I'd photographed so I wouldn't lose the paper. The actual photos that mattered were in there somewhere but I could not get to them.
That was the moment I got serious. Not because I lost anything permanently that time, thank goodness, but because I realized I had no system at all. Just a pile. An eight-year pile, as it turned out, once I actually counted.
The opinion I'm firm on
One system, done okay, beats three systems done perfectly. I've watched people in this class set up Google Photos AND iCloud AND buy an external hard drive, and then trust none of them, because they're never sure which one actually has the current version of everything. Pick one. Get it running. Actually use it. We'll talk today about which one makes sense for your phone, and honestly for most of you it's going to be whatever's already built into your phone, because that's the one that'll actually keep working without you thinking about it.
You do not need three systems. You need one system you trust.
What backing up actually looks like, today
We're going to go into your phone's settings together. If you're on iPhone, it's iCloud Photos, and I'll walk you through exactly which toggle to switch on, it's about four taps. If you're Android, it's Google Photos, and I'm going to be honest with you, I'm an iPhone person, so if you're on Android and you know this menu better than I do, please jump in and help your neighbor. I mean that. I'm not going to fake my way through it.
Once you turn it on, your phone is going to start uploading everything. All of it. Every photo, every video, and depending how many you've got and how good your wifi is, this could take a while. I want you to just let it run in the background this week. Don't touch it. Don't stop it to go delete stuff first. Let the safety net finish going up.
A word of caution here: if you're on a limited data plan and not on wifi, don't kick this off out in the parking lot on your way home. Cellular data will chew through fast with thousands of photos uploading. Do it at home on wifi, or here in the room, we've got wifi for exactly this reason.
What we're not doing yet
We are not deleting anything today. We are not making folders today. We are not going through and picking favorites. All of that is next lesson and the one after, once your backup is confirmed running and you're not one dropped phone away from losing Jackson's kindergarten pictures or your kid's recital or whatever matters to you.
(I lost a batch of my son's kindergarten photos years ago, phone died, no backup, gone. I bring it up in every single class I teach because I want people to actually feel it a little instead of just nodding along.)
Backup now. Organize later. That's the whole lesson.
Before next time
Let your backup finish uploading completely before our next session, even if it takes a few days. Just check on it once in a while and make sure the little upload counter isn't stuck.