by Bill Adler
Summer's here and along with the dangers posed by undercooked
barbecue meats, ravenous mosquitoes, thunderstorm-canceled airplane flights and
Metro meltdowns, comes the greatest danger of all: lost vacation photos.
But that danger need not exist if you take photos with a
smartphone. You can tell your smartphone to automatically back up your photos
whenever you're in range of wifi. Once your phone is set to do this, you can
have the peace of mind that goes with knowing that while you may have left your
favorite sandals at the beach, at least your photos weren't lost there, too.
Let's start with the most ubiquitous app of them all:
Facebook. If you have Facebook's app on your phone, you can set the app so that
every photo you take is synced with Facebook. Facebook keeps your uploaded
photos private unless you release a particular photo to the universe. To set up
photo syncing on Facebook visit https://www.facebook.com/help/photosync.
Google+ does essentially the same thing, and is another
great way to back up all your photos. As with Facebook, once you've set up
automatic uploads, you can forget about it. Also like Facebook, the photos that
you automatically upload to Google+ are private unless you specify otherwise.
Here's how: http://bit.ly/ZmEMzg.
Dropbox offers the same feature: www.dropbox.com/help/289/en. As
with Facebook and Google+, it's easy to set up and the app will automatically
upload your photos whenever you have wifi on.
Flickr, owned by the revitalized Yahoo, just added a
terrific new feature, 1 terabyte of free storage for everyone. Now that's a lot
of photos. Flickr is set up for sharing, but if you want to use it as a backup
service and not have every photo you take be visible to the universe, tweak
your Flickr privacy settings so that the default privacy mode for your sets is
"private" and your search visibility is hidden. Once you've done that
you'll have virtually unlimited photo storage. You can get the mobile app here:
www.flickr.com/mobile, or a third
party app for Android here: http://bit.ly/13a0CTR
and for iPhone here: http://bit.ly/12a7Vzh.
These apps should have auto upload on wifi only as their
default setting, but that's something you might want to double-check,
especially if you have a limited cellular data plan. You can have more than one
auto photo uploader, too, for sharing or backup.
Smartphones rock!
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Bill Adler is the co-publisher of the Cleveland Park
Listserv, www.cleveland-park.com.
He is the author of "Boys and Their Toys: Understanding Men by
Understanding Their Relationship with Gadgets," http://amzn.to/rspOft. He tweets at
@billadler.
I second the motion! Losing pictures is less expected when you capture images through a smartphone, which has an integrated online storage service, depending on the brand. Some automatically upload mobile pictures, some work manually. But the thing is, either way, photo security is so within our reach now.
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