Jim Rossman: You are backing up your photos, right?

Photos sure do take up a lot of space on our phones and computers.

When smartphone cameras took over as our main cameras, more storage on the phones became a necessity.

Remember when your phone only had 8 or 16 gigabytes of storage? The new iPhone 16 and Google Pixel 9 Pro have a minimum of 128 GB of storage with options for expanding it up to 256 GB for the Pixel 9 and 512 GB for the iPhone 16.

The iPhone 16 Pro and Google Pixel 9 Pro models give options up to one terabyte.

The cameras on our phones are also better, meaning the photos and videos they capture are larger. A lot of us copy our photos over to our computers, where hard drives are larger and adding storage is easy. Copying photos to a computer is a cheap and easy way to back up the pictures and videos on your phone.

Next you might consider engaging with a cloud backup service to back up your precious memories automatically.

iPhone users have Apple’s iCloud service built into the phone. Apple includes 5 GB of free storage, but you’ll burn through that quickly. Apple will be happy to sell you more storage. I personally pay $2.99 per month for 200 GB, and if needed, I could upgrade to 2 TB per month for $9.99 per month and even stretch it to 12 TB for $59.99 per month.

Android phone users get 15 GB of free storage from Google. Extra storage pricing is similar to Apple’s at $2.99 per month for 2 TB with plans up to $149.99 per month for 30 TB.

The higher tiers of storage sound expensive, but you can share it between members of your family group.

The nice thing about Google’s cloud storage is that iPhone users can choose it as well, if they install the Google Photos app.

Lastly, you can directly export photos from your smartphone to an external hard drive or flash drive.

iPhone users can buy small hard drive enclosures that piggyback onto the MagSafe connector on the back of the phone. This is the way to go if you use your phone for shooting 4K videos.

Connecting an external drive is the fastest way to move videos off the iPhone or Android phone. You can find the directions online.

The key is to have multiple backup sets of your important photos.