Back up your photos

Never again lose a cherished memory

Photos and videos can be deeply personal keepsakes, so it’s vital to safeguard them. If they’re stored only in a single location or device, they are vulnerable.

The best backup method depends on the devices you use. If you use an iPhone for capture and a Mac for editing, Apple suggests iCloud Photo Library. You activate this on your Mac in Photos > Preferences > iCloud; on your iPhone, go to Settings > [your name] > iCloud > Photos. Turn on iCloud Photo Library and your library starts uploading.

With iCloud Photo Library switched on, photos, videos, and your edits become available across all your devices. Photos are no longer included in your iCloud backup, making that smaller, but you still need the same space to be available in your iCloud storage. Be mindful that uploads take a long time (especially on slow connections), and will likely require you to upgrade your iCloud storage if you take a lot of photos.

Apple offers another option as an alternative: My Photo Stream. This doesn’t eat into your iCloud storage allowance, but it includes only the most recent 30 days of photos, and it omits videos and Live Photos. If you use Photo Stream, you must connect your iPhone to your Mac on a regular basis to download videos and Live Photos to the Photos app. You should also do this if you choose to use neither iCloud Photo Library nor Photo Stream — otherwise anything you capture on your iPhone will be gone if you lose the device. (Likewise when using non-Apple cameras that have no connection with Photo Stream or iCloud Photo Library.)

To further safeguard photos and videos, consider making periodic backups of your Photos library, which is usually located in your user account’s Pictures folder. Consider getting into the habit of exporting particularly important images and videos

to a folder within your Pictures folder. This means they won’t vanish if accidentally deleted from your iCloud Photo Library (which mirrors changes made on any device to all devices), and will be backed up on an ongoing basis by whatever regime you’re using to safeguard your Mac’s contents — Time Machine, cloning, the cloud, or some combination.

One other backup of sorts worth bearing in mind: printing. There are many affordable ways to make physical copies of favorite photos, like uploading them to an online service that will mail prints to you. Good quality prints can last 100 years.