While $0.99 per month for 50 GB total iCloud storage sounds like a good deal, it's not necessary if you only have 10 GB of media you want to store.
Google photos backup in background iphone free#
Fortunately, Google offers 15 GB of free storage, making it easy to upload your Camera Roll for safekeeping. With iPhone backups, app data, iCloud Drive files, and even emails (if you have a Mac, Me, or iCloud email address), you'll quickly run out of space to back up photos and videos. No need to be obsessive, but if you want to be sure you don’t lose any photos, open the apps that you’re counting on for backups and make sure they’re up to date.Since iCloud's introduction in 2011, you get only 5 GB of complimentary cloud storage with your Apple account. As long as music is playing, the screen will dim but won’t turn off and the foreground app will be allowed to work continuously. Here’s one example: connect the phone to a charger, start playing music, then open Google Photos and let it run in the foreground. There are other hacks if you have a large number of photos to back up. It took multiple sessions with our phones to get the photos uploaded to Google Photos when we were connected to home Wi-Fi. We came back from our vacation with a few hundred photos and a week without cell service or Wi-Fi. If you’re taking a large number of photos, you may need to babysit the app and keep your phone alive while they upload. Once your entire photo library is online, the default settings are usually enough to upload new photos each day without any special effort.
Look in Settings / Privacy / Location Services and you’ll probably find apps like Google Photos, OneDrive and Dropbox are set to “Always.”
That gives the app another ten minutes to upload photos each time you move from place to place. Apps that use location services are allowed to wake up whenever the phone changes location. Instead, the apps are exploiting an Apple loophole. It has nothing to do with marking the location of a photo – that’s done automatically by the camera. Each app asks for permission to use location services. Sure enough, the apps use a trick that is sufficient to keep your photos safe most of the time. That would make them wholly unreliable as a backup for keeping photos safely stored online. You’re thinking: it can’t be true that the apps never upload photos unless you open them deliberately. It won’t improve battery life or performance. There is no advantage to quitting the apps by swiping up on dozens of app windows. That’s why Apple’s unambiguous advice is to leave apps alone. It doesn’t matter how many apps are open – almost none of them are allowed to use any power after a few minutes, even if technically they appear to be “running” when you flick through the open apps. It’s an important part of Apple’s power management. There are a couple of special exceptions (music and navigation), but all other apps are forced to sleep after ten minutes, regardless of whether they have more work to do. So why aren’t the photos always uploaded?Īpple imposes a strict limitation on all apps: when an app is closed or the phone is locked, an app is only allowed to run in the background for about ten minutes. “Allow apps to refresh their content when on Wi-Fi or cellular in the background.” Sounds reassuring, right? The apps may have additional options – for example, the settings in the Google Photos app include a toggle authorizing use of cellular data to back up photos, instead of waiting for a Wi-Fi connection. You’ll likely find that it’s turned on for each app. You can go look at the settings for each app in Settings / General / Background App Refresh. When you turn on photo uploading in Google Photos, OneDrive, or Dropbox, one of the options is background uploading. I thought they would upload automatically all the time. And sure enough, that’s exactly what was happening. I’d open up the apps on our phones and see swirling circles, as if the phones had just decided to upload the photos at that moment. My wife or I would take photos with iPhones that are supposed to back up to Google Photos and OneDrive – but the photos weren’t online when I looked for them on my computer later. It took me a while to figure this one out. Otherwise there’s a chance that some photos won’t have been uploaded when you drop the phone or lose it. If you rely on Google Photos, OneDrive, Dropbox or other online services to back up your photos from an iPhone, open those apps when you’re connected to Wi-Fi and make sure they have synced your photos online. Here’s a tip for iPhone users that might make you sleep more soundly.