Keeping My Favorite Photos Safe

Disclosure: I am participating in the Verizon Boomer Voices program and have been provided with a wireless device and six months of service in exchange for my honest opinions about the product.

Blog photos, family photos, and just everyday photos boy, oh boy have I got photos.  As a Grandmother, blogger, wife and traveler I have tons of photos I would like to keep safe. Today I am going to share a little about my photo saving problems and the solution I was able to come up with to solve this issue. I started out by asking myself a few questions. If you would like to join my brainstorming session and see where it leads. Please answer the questions with me. Feel free to express yourself in the comments section of the post. I would love to hear your ideas and solutions to this problem.  

How often do you use your cell phone camera to take pictures?

Many times I have found my cell phone camera useful in capturing that spur of the moment event that I would not have been able to because I did not have a camera on me. I think about the first time my grandson started walking. No one was expecting it at the moment. There were no real cameras lying about. So we all whipped out our cell phones and started snapping pictures as fast as we could.
Conclusion to question one. Cell phones are great for capturing life's most important memories.

How many photos do you have stored on your phone?

I have over 1,500 on my new phone. My new phone is only a few months old. The last cell phone I used had over 5,000 pictures and videos stored on the phone. I am wondering if I am the only person who does not delete photos.
Conclusion to question two. Cell phones sure can store a ton of photos. But are they safe?

How do you move your photos from your phone to your computer?

This is the one problem I have not solved until just recently. In the past when I wanted to move photos from my cell phone I would email each and every photo to myself. Although this was tedious and only allowed me to move one or a few photos at a time, this was my first choice of action. When I decided I had an over abundance of photos stored on my phone I would plug the phone into my computer and move the photos to a folder on my computer. My method was working fine until I lost my cell phone. Then I realized it was not the answer to my problems.
One would think I would have learned from my mistakes but I guess I am a little hard headed when it comes to changes. A few months ago my computer decided to just up and quit with out notice! What an untimely death. I was very lucky because my dear son was able to retrieve my photos off the hard drive and a few uncorrupted documents.
Conclusion to question three. After serious some thought. Storing photos on a phone or computer will not keep them safe.

Do you have a back-up storage system for your photos and important documents? 

I have always thought of purchasing an external hard drive for back up of our important documents and photos. I need to look further into a external hard drive for this purpose. In the mean time I remember at some point during the Verizon Boomer Voices blogger training program a speaker mentioning being able to back up photos taken from my phone automatically on to G+ or Google Drive. There is that ah ha moment! A little light bulb just lit up and was getting brighter as I thought about the memory. 

OK, I have a G+ account. Most bloggers I know have a G+ account. How hard can it be to set up my phone to automatically save my photos to my G+ account? This is kind of a technical issue and I am not the greatest at figuring out technical problems. 

Conclusion to question four. Saving photos in the cloud on G+ will make a great solution to safely storing photos. That is if I can implement this feature on my cell phone. 

I had to start somewhere so here we go.

My first step was to look up information on auto backing up photos on G+.from a mobile device. 

They have some great step by step information that is easy to follow on that web page. Next, I opened the preloaded G+ app on my Droid Razr Maxx HD. I looked into the settings hoping to find the camera and photos settings. I did not see this listed in the G+ settings. I must have opened and closed the app multiple times. I was fairly certain it was there I just was not finding the right listing in the settings. At this point I was frustrated and had thought of making a trip to the Verizon Wireless store near our home. (The time being 10:30 pm that was not going to happen.) I have on many occasions taken a trip over to one of their stores just to get answers or help with cell phone problems. I think it is the simplest way to get answers to technical problems with a cell phone when you just can't figure it out by yourself. I can tell you from experience that the Verizon Representatives are very helpful and extremely knowledgeable.

I have had a few application problems in the past on other cell phones. I thought back to other instances and came up with four steps I could take to get the G+ app to work correctly.

Step 1. Sign out of the application and sign back in. 

Step 2. Reinstall the application or update. 

Step 3. Get knowledgeable help. In this case I would ask my husband or son.

Step 4. Contact or visit the cell phone provider.

I am happy to report after following step one I was able to find the Camera and Photo setting listed in the G+ settings.

I followed these steps to set the auto backing up of photos on G+ from my cell phone.

This is such an amazing feature for a cell phone and application. I am now going to upload my photos to a photo printing website and have prints made of my most precious photos. .

My readers, What do you think? How do you back up your photos?