Your phone is full of photos. What now?

Why it happened so quickly

You did nothing special: it is the files that have grown. A photo taken with a recent phone weighs between 3 and 6 MB, and we take far more of them than before. One minute of 4K video approaches 350 MB — a single family party on video, and you have used several gigabytes.

On top of that comes a change many people did not notice: Google's free unlimited photo storage ended in June 2021. Since then, the free space (up to 15 GB) is shared between email, documents and photos. A cluttered mailbox is therefore enough to block your photo backup, with no apparent link between the two.

The move that loses photos

When the phone is full, the temptation is to make room straight away: sort, delete, empty the bin. That is where photos disappear — and almost never on the day itself.

The story is always the same. The backup looked active, but it had stopped: no space left at the provider, connection cut at the wrong moment, the app put to sleep by the phone to save battery. The last few weeks of photos never left. They get deleted anyway, since “it is backed up”. And the hole is discovered months later, while looking for one particular picture.

The bin offers one last safety net — 30 days with most services, 60 with some — but it only protects you if you notice the problem within that window. That is rarely the case.

The three proofs to demand before deleting

Here is the method we apply, and it holds whichever tool you use. Before a photo is deleted from the phone, three conditions must all be met. If a single one is missing, nothing is touched.

1. The phone believes it sent the photo. Necessary, and nowhere near sufficient: it is only what the software thinks it did. The photo may have been deleted from the server since, by you or by someone else.
2. The server returns it today, at the exact size. We ask again, right now, and compare the size reported. If the server cannot answer, the answer is “I do not know” — so nothing gets deleted.
3. The bytes match. We read back the beginning and the end of the uploaded file and compare them with the original. The beginning of a photo carries its technical record — camera, date taken, settings — and the end catches a transfer cut short.

Never on the name, never on the date: two photos can both be called IMG_2847.jpg without being the same one. That is precisely how photos are lost by people who believed they had checked.

The result of this method: the worst that can happen is freeing up less room than possible. Never deleting the only copy that was left.

The five solutions, compared

1. Paying for more storage with the same provider

The simplest: a few euros a month to push the limit back. Nothing to install, nothing to understand. It is a subscription without end, and above all it settles nothing: your phone stays full, since the photos stay on it too. You have bought time, not room.

2. Copying to a computer or an external hard drive

The free solution, and a perfectly sound one. Plug the phone in, copy, delete. Its two weaknesses are known to everyone who has tried it: you have to remember — so you do it twice, then never again — and a single hard drive sitting on a shelf is still a single copy. A flood, a theft, a fall, and everything is gone at once.

If you choose that one, make two copies, one of them somewhere other than home.

3. A storage box at home (NAS)

Excellent, and it is what many technically comfortable people do. The backup becomes automatic, the photos stay at your place, and there is no subscription. In return: a few hundred euros to start, an installation to carry out, updates to follow, and the same risk as above if the box is your only copy — a NAS at home burns with the house.

4. Another online backup service

Moving to a provider that does not live off advertising. The storage is somewhere other than your home, maintained by people whose job it is, and your photos survive losing the phone as well as losing the house. It is a subscription, and you have to choose who to trust with your memories.

5. Ours

This is the one we sell, so judge it with suspicion — and read the other four first. It has one strength and one limitation, both plain.

The strength: our servers are in Frontenex, in Savoie, within our own walls. Not at a rented host, not abroad. Face recognition, which groups your photos by person, runs on these same servers, and the number you call is that of the person who runs the machines.

The limitation: the app exists for Android, not yet for iPhone. If you are on iPhone, solutions 2, 3 and 4 are the ones for you today, and we would rather tell you now than let you find out after signing up.

Checking that a backup really works

Whichever solution you pick, run this test once. It takes five minutes and it is worth every promise ever made to you.

1. Take a recognisable photo — a piece of paper with today's date written on it does the job nicely.
2. Wait for the delay your service announces, or start the backup by hand.
3. Open the service from another device — the computer, the tablet, somebody else's phone. Above all not from the app on the phone itself, which would show you the local photo and let you believe it had been uploaded.
4. The photo is there and opens full size? The chain works end to end.

Run this test again after every change of phone, and once a year. It is the only way to know: a backup is not judged by its settings screen, but by what can be got back out of it.

Frequently asked questions

Further reading

Creating an e-mail address with your own domain name — the four ways of going about it, and why so much mail ends up in the junk folder.

Shrink a photo — a free tool that makes your photos lighter right in your browser, without uploading them, and strips their GPS location along the way.