What do I do with the Video and Photos on my Phone in 2023?
If you have a digital phone, you use it to take photos and video — everyone does. Everyone is a photographer and videographer and their photos and video are the best — and they are as you captured a moment in time that is gone, but that moment is on your phone for viewing and reliving.
There are many questions you may not have thought about once you have leaped into the digital phone world — you are not alone. And many, like you, come to a realization that I have thousands and thousands of photos and video on their phone and no where to save them.
The worst places to save your photos and video are on social media sites like facebook, instagram, tiktok, pinterest, and others. Oh they make it sound wonderful, easy, and convient for you, but unless you care about your privacy and who owns your media DO NOT POST THEM ONLINE TO SOCIAL MEDIA SITES.
They have hidden small print that they can do what they want with your photos and video, and the meta information that is attached to the photo and video when you take it like geo location, time, date, and if you have facial recognition turned on, they also know the names of the people in the photo and what they look like. If you do not care that the world, criminals, corporations, advertisers, and whoever else buys it or finds it online has all this data about you, your friends, and loved ones — your 6-year old niece playing at the playground was abducted and never seen again — then by all means share your stuff and be a victim. The people that it happens to never thought it would, could, or felt they had anything they had to hide until it is too late.
For those that are concerned and awake about their privacy and data from the media they share from their phone, there are many legit, safe,and secure ways you can archive and share photographs and video from your phone.
Forgot to mention that your phone has the possibility to get lost, stolen, or broken. Cannot get your photos and videos now. Do the right thing and choose one or more options below to preserve and protect yourself and your photos and video off your phone.
1. Archive on Computer and External Hard Drive
The best way to save and archive your photos and video from your phone is to connect it to a computer and download all of the photos and videos to the computer. Now you can delete them, or as my wife does, she deletes what she does not want to share with people — usually about 3500 pictures she keeps on her phone for social gatherings, NOT social media.
To be double safe and secure, you should transfer your photos and video from your computer to an external hard drive or thumb drive and store that is a safe and secure place, just in case your computer and/or you phone crashes.
2. Use iCloud Shared Albums
If you use an iPhone and/or a Mac, then using the iCloud Shared Albums is a more secure way to share photos and videos with the people you only want to share them with — I have been using this service since 2012 and it is easy to use and select pictures and video from your photos album to add to the shared album, as well as adding recipients to the list of people who can access that album.
3. Remove the Geo-Location and Meta Tags
Some phones have the ability to turn off the geo-location tagging of photos and video. The problem with that is when you view a photo that has no geo-location, along with any other identity, you cannot remember when and where where the photo or video was taken — not a game changer for most people — yet, for my vast library of photos, it is important to me to have that information attached to the photo.
What I do is duplicate the photo and add "nogeo" to its title and then remove the geo-location and other meta data from the photo and video. Yes, you will have duplicates of your photos, but you only do that to the ones you are going to share, not all of them.
4. Share Via Email
Sharing Via Email takes the risk of anyone viewing your photos and video to only the people you send them to. The downside to this is that most video do not send well via email unless you have them stored on a cloud service, like iCloud, google drive, dropbox, and others that are reputable and do not access your data even on their servers.
Sending more than one photo can also be a discouraging task unless you shrink the image from its original size specific for sending via email.
5. Video Collection
A Video Collection of all your videos for the month, year, or longer makes it safe and easy to share with others as we remove critical hidden meta data. Although, we could add titles and tags to identify the people and locations, these videos should not be shared online, but they are much safer to do so.
6. Photo and Video Collection
A Photo and Video Collection adds still photos with your videos making it safe and easy to share with others as we remove critical hidden meta data. Although, we could add titles and tags to identify the people and locations, these videos should not be shared online, but they are much safer to do so.
What do you do with the Video and Photos on your Phone?
“You took the time to capture the moment in a photo or video, now that the moment is gone, do not let it vanish forever, choose to do the right thing by preserving, archiving, and sharing the moment the safe and secure way.” - gerald
Davenport Video Digital Memories can help you with your massive photo and video library on your phone.