How to transfer photos and videos off your phone

It's unfortunate, but bad things happen to phones all the time. For instance, they break when dropped or get stolen. Many people have lost precious memories because of it. Moving photos and videos off your phone is the best way to protect them and free up storage space without permanently losing them.

You can use several reliable methods, whether you're using an iPhone or an Android device, to transfer photos and videos from your phone to a computer or cloud storage. Keep reading to find out how.

iPhone users can also use Apple's cloud storage service, iCloud, to automatically sync and back up their photos and videos to the cloud. This will also make them accessible across all your Apple devices, as well as Windows. Follow these steps:

When you turn on Sync this iPhone, your photos and videos will be automatically uploaded to iCloud and securely stored in their original, full-resolution formats.

Be aware that just syncing your photos and videos to iCloud doesn't immediately free up space on your iPhone. You're creating a copy in iCloud, but the full-size photos and videos still remain on your phone. Now that your photos and videos are backed up to iCloud, here's the crucial step to actually clear space on your iPhone. You'll need to enable a special setting called Optimize iPhone Storage. Here's how to do it:

This setting keeps smaller, space-saving versions of your photos and videos on your iPhone while the full-resolution originals stay safely stored in iCloud. This way, your iPhone frees up storage space without deleting any photos and videos. However, note that this depends on the number of photos and videos you have and the overall space used. Optimizing doesn't guarantee immediate, huge storage savings. It can take time, especially for 4K videos.

Pro tip: Don't delete photos and videos manually to save space. If you delete a photo or video on your iPhone, it's also removed from iCloud. Let the "optimize" setting do the work for you.

Google Photos is a convenient cloud storage solution that works across all devices, offering both free and paid storage options for backing up your photos and videos securely. You can back up your phone's photos and videos to Google Photos with the steps below.

Now that your photos and videos are safely backed up to Google Photos, you can free up space on your Android device:

That's it. You've now backed up your photos and videos, freeing up valuable storage space on your Android device.

On both iPhone and Android, deleted photos and videos usually go to a "Recently Deleted" or "Trash" folder and stay there for up to 30 days. To immediately free up space and ensure your photos and videos are truly gone, open this folder and permanently delete the photos and videos.

With the photos and videos stored safely on the cloud, you can access and download them anytime. Here is what you need to know:

If you're a Windows user, you can easily transfer photos and videos from your phone using the built-in Photos app to import your pictures and videos directly to your PC. Follow the steps below to do that.

If you moved your photos and videos to a computer and then deleted them from your phone, they're gone from the device but remain safe on your computer. Always double-check that your transfer was successful before deleting anything from your phone.

For Android users, accessing the DCIM (Digital Camera Images) folder directly through Windows File Explorer provides a simple way to transfer photos and video from your phone to your computer. Here's how to do it:

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