Help with Photo Printing and Storage

judyc Couple of questions: Do you have a PC laptop or a MacBook? Are you “married” to using iCloud, or would you be comfortable using another app/service on your iPhone to back up photos in the cloud (eg, Google Photos, Amazon, etc)?

I used to use Snapfish but stopped because the quality of the prints and the printing have gone way down in my opinion. I scrap slowly, so now I use an Epson PM-400 and my larger printer to print photos at home as I scrap them. Not sure which online photo services are still good. I know a lot of folks swear by Persnickety Prints, but I have not tried them (yet).

I take most of my photos these days with my iPhone, so for photo storage I use iCloud but also have an iMac and make sure that my photos sync to my iMac through iCloud at full resolution, and then I back up my iMac using Time Machine on an external drive. So all of my photos are in iCloud, on my iMac, and also backed up on an external drive.

When I used Snapfish in the past, I would go through my photos in iCloud, create albums of just the ones I wanted to print, then I would export each album as .jpg files in a folder on my desktop and upload them to Snapfish when I wanted to print a big batch. After I received the photos, I would delete the folder with the .jpg versions so I wouldn’t clog up my iMac storage with two sets of the same photos.

If I had a PC instead of a Mac, I would probably stop using iCloud and instead use the Google Photos app on my iPhone to store photos, and use Google Drive on the PC to access the photos and send to a print service.

I also sync my iPhone with macbook, I do export some photos in order to save to external hard drive and backup to another cloud storage site: forever.com. It's not cheap, but easy to use from laptop or phone.

Have you thought about limiting/selecting what photos you print/backup to make the process less daunting? Also do you organize your photos in your iphone into albums? That may help with your selection process.

I probably only print/scrap like a total of 25-50 photos a year, not counting mini photos for planner-type books. So after a event or periodically, I scroll thru photos and favorite ones I know I want to print. Then if it's a bigger occasion or trip, I may make a separate album for all of those photos. You can always upload to photo printing site directly from an album - I have albums like "to print", "to scrap".

I mainly print at home, but if I use a printing service I print with mpix or persnickety prints. I stopped using snapfish/shutterfly years ago due to lack of quality.

I am not sure on the icloud question, but as long as you continue to have the phone and maintain the account, it shouldn't go poof. If you are looking to transition all of those files/photos to another backup service, you may want to look at a few different ones and see what kind of services they offer. They may have the ability to do it more efficiently than the time it would take for you to do it.

Oh, also you can change the settings in your iphone to save photos as jpeg, and I know Persnickety can automatically convert. I also haven't had any issue with mpix. So that may be an iphone settings thing. If you are familiar with Persnickety Prints, check out their site/blog or app, because they have a lot of good tutorials and information regarding this type of thing.

www.persnicketyprints.com/blog/

You can change your iPhone camera setting to save all photos as jpeg instead of heic (in Settings > Camera > Formats > Camera Capture > select Most Compatible). (Oops, I should have read the previous comments before I answered   )

I use the cloud as well as Google Photos (photos from my camera automatically upload to both). When I open Google Photos on my PC, all my photos automatically upload. I then open each photo individually to decide which ones I want to download to my PC and which ones I want to delete.

I have a large format printer as well as an Epson PM-400, so I can't help with any printing suggestions.

Hmmm….Try changing the video settings to HD instead of 4K (if you haven’t already) and see if that helps. It’s odd that setting to Most Compatible is not giving you default .jpg files.