How to Backup Your iPhone Photos For Free

You can backup your iPhone photos for free to Google Photos or another cloud service so that you don’t need to pay Apple for iCloud Storage or use iCloud Library. We’ll show you how to set this up and answer common questions about using Google Photos on an iPhone.

Apple includes 5GB of iCloud storage with your iPhone, but that’s not really enough to be usable for an iPhone backup, or more than a few photos. If you are taking a lot of photos and you don’t have enough room on iCloud to save them you can pay Apple 99 cents a month for 50GB of storage or you can download Google Photos and backup your pictures for free.

How to Backup Your iPhone Photos for Free

With Google Photos you can backup your iPhone photos for free, and never run out of space.

Follow these steps to backup your iPhone photos to Google Photos for free. You can get unlimited Google Photos storage if you choose a lower quality backup, which is what we will focus on so that you can get it all backed up for free.

1. Download the Google Photos app on iPhone.
2. When prompted allow access to your Photos.
3. The Default Setting is High, which is unlimited storage. Leave it.
4. Leave WIFi only syncing.
5. Choose your Gmail account at the bottom of the screen.
6. Tap done.

That’s all it takes to backup your iPhone photos for free with Google Photos. It will take a while for them to all backup, and you can tap on Assistant to see what photos need backed up still and you will also see some cool options and automatically edited photos on that screen.

It’s easy to setup Google Photos backup.

Google will identify places and things in your photos so that you can search for them once the photos are uploaded. As long as you leave the quality at High, you will never run out of storage on Google. If you run out of storage on your iPhone, you may run into issues.

You can use Google Photos to delete some photos from your iPhone that are already backed up. To do this you need to follow these directions. Do not manually delete photos.

1. Open Google Photos.
2. Tap on Settings.
3. Tap on Free up Space.
4. Follow the rest of Google’s instructions.
5. Close Google Photos.
6. Open the iPhone Photos App.
7. Go to Recently Deleted.
8. Delete those Photos and Videos.

Once that is done, you should have more space on your iPhone to take photos. It’s more complicated than using iCloud Photo Library, so if you are constantly running out of space on your iPhone you may be better off paying 99 cents a month for more iCloud storage than using this method.

See Older Messages on the Lock Screen

> 1 / 31

You can quickly look at your older messages and notifications from the lock screen without unlocking your phone to get to the Notification Center.  When you are on the Lock Screen, simply pull up from the middle of the screen and you will see your Notifications from Earlier today. You can also clear these out from this screen.  If you want to reply to someone or interact with a message just swipe on it, Swipe left to right to open and right to left to choose to view or clear individual notifications.

> 1 / 31