Your photos, safe and sorted

1. Where your photos actually live. Here is the single most important idea in this course, and it is worth a cup of tea and a moment’s thought: a photo on your phone normally lives in the phone itself , on a little memory chip inside the handset.
2. Backing up without tears. On Android phones, the usual tool for the job is the Google Photos app — its icon looks like a small, colourful pinwheel.
3. Finding photos again. Once your photos are safe, the next pleasure is finding them again.
4. Sharing the joy. Photos double in value when they are shared.
5. Printing them. A photo on a screen is lovely; a photo on the mantelpiece is part of the furniture.
6. A tidy-up that frees your phone. Sooner or later, every phone complains that its storage is nearly full — and photos are usually the reason.

1. A photo on your phone is usually the only copy in the world — until a backup is switched on.
2. Check your backup in Google Photos: tap your profile picture or initial and look for the word “backup” — you want “on” or “complete”.
3. Backup is free within your Google account’s 15 GB allowance (shared with Gmail and Google Drive), at the time of writing.
4. The cloud simply means a second copy kept on Google’s secure computers — your photos still appear on the phone as normal.
5. Find any photo with the search box: try a place, a month, a year, or a word like “dog” or “beach”.
6. Gather the special ones into albums — the digital version of the album on the shelf.
7. Share one or two photos by WhatsApp; share a whole occasion as an album, so everyone sees the full set in one place.
8. Only share album links with people you know — anyone holding a link may be able to view it.
9. Supermarkets and high-street chemists print straight from your phone or a USB stick — and photo books make wonderful gifts.
10. The golden rule: never delete photos until backup is confirmed — then tidy freely, or use the free-up-space feature.

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