One of my most common “I can’t believe you live like this” moments is when I see someone else’s camera roll. Thousands of screenshots, terrible photos, they can’t find the one photo they want to show me and of course, their storage is full. I avoid this by doing regular backups of all my photos and deleting about 90% of them. The result is a camera roll of only the best where each one evokes a memory.

Raw Export

The first step (and what allows the rest of it) is a full backup of every photo. I don’t think I could get myself to delete most photos permanently. For screenshots and photos of documents, I’m terrified of needing them later. And for even the most mundane of photos, I feel like I’m permanently deleting the memory when I delete the photo. Which is why the first step is to dump all of the photos into a folder on my Mac.

The Image Capture app comes preinstalled on macOS and works perfectly for this. Once you plug in your iPhone it lets you export everything in your camera roll to a folder on your Mac. It even skips any photos you’ve previously imported. The point of this backup is to give me peace of mind that if I ever need a photo in the future, I can find it. But it’s not something I look at regularly so I just have the files grouped by year.

Photo Library

Next, I import all of my photos into the Photos app. When you have your iPhone connected it gives you the option to import all new photos and delete them from your iPhone. The process is pretty seamless, but the delete part is a bit clunky. It seems to only start deleting the photos from your phone after it imports all of them, but there’s no progress indicator. The photos just start to disappear which can take a few minutes if you’ve got a lot.

Now is the most important part of the process. Deleting the majority of the photos. I go through all of the newly imported photos and only keep the ones that evoke a memory. I’m quite liberal with my photo taking which leads to me deleting about 90%. I’ll reiterate that the key here is to only keep photos that are tied to a memory. I don’t need a photo of every alleyway I walked down in Hanoi, only the best one and when I look back on it I think of wandering around the city. One picture per meal, the dining room, or even just a shot of the door. That’s all you need to remember a good meal. You can think of it as if you were going through your photos with a friend, do I have a story to tell with this photo? If not delete it. Less is more with this process and if later on you decide to change your mind you can get the photo back from the backup in part one.

The deletion process can be a bit of a drag, but it’s hard to describe how great it feels to scroll through my camera roll after. No screenshots, terrible food picks, or unflattering angles. Only the best of the best. And since I went through all the photos instead of just taking them and forgetting, I have a solid idea of what photos are in my library. This makes it super easy to bring up anything I need quickly in the future.

Sync to Phone

Now that the photo library is all sorted I connect my iPhone and sync it to the Mac photo library. This process works well, but occasionally there will be a slight discrepancy. I haven’t been able to figure out what causes it, but it’s usually only a few photos and resolves itself after a few more syncs. The biggest annoyance is that you cannot modify your Mac’s photos on the iPhone. This means if you want to delete a photo you’ll have to do it on your Mac and then sync again.

Backups

I plan to write a more in-depth blog about my backup strategy, but the summary is I use Time Machine for a local backup and Backblaze for cloud backup. This means I have a backup of all my photos on my Mac, external drive, and the cloud. The only flaw in the system is that I do not backup my phone to the cloud which means that if I lose it I would also lose the last week or so of photos. I’m ok with this and if anything, it forces me to backup my phone to my Mac more regularly. However, if you would like to also backup your phone directly I would recommend Google Photos.

Google Photos

I used Google Photos as my only form of backup for years. The service works seamlessly on iOS. All of your photos are uploaded to the cloud and you are given the option to delete the local copy with one click. While I personally stopped using it once I lost access to unlimited storage through my university, I set it up for my mom who is happy with it, and from my recent experience, the service is as good as ever. In addition, Google Takeout makes it simple to download all of your photos if you ever decide to move away from using the service. If you’re looking to backup your photos from your phone and don’t mind using a Google service then it’s fantastic.

iCloud

You might expect me to have positive things to say about iCloud since every part of my process uses Apple’s tools, but you would be wrong. I would expect iCloud Photos to work the same as Google Photos. I pay for cloud storage, my photos get uploaded, and I can delete them from my phone. But no, it is a syncing service, not a backup service. What does that mean? Hell if I know. Where is the source of truth? Is it in the cloud or on one of the devices I have synced? Can I get rid of my phone and just look at the photos on icloud.com? I gave up trying to understand this service. Like most of Apple’s other offerings, it’s supposed to “just work”, but for me it never did and I’m too paranoid about losing my photos to trust this thing.