I'm using an iPhone 5, 16 GB model, and this 16 GB is getting a bit cramped. The biggest category is photo's (2.65 GB) and email (2.4 GB). The rest is apps and a bit of music (less than 1 GB) I've come to the point that I've only got +/- 100 MB of free space left. This is problematic because that's too little to even do the latest firmware upgrade...

I plan on upgrading to a 6S (64 GB) when it gets released, but in the meanwhile I need a solution for this. So I was thinking to temporarily copy the photo's of 2013 and 2014 to a folder on my Windows PC and delete then from the phone. Then, when I get the new phone, copy them back. (I like having ALL my photo's close-by)

The problem is the iPhone doesn't seem to store the photos in a single DCIM folder, but rather in a lot of subfolders (32 in my case to be exact). In the past, this had made it a pain to locate a certain photo (but with clever date searches this is do-able), but in this case I'm reluctant to just delete the photo's because my gut tells me there will be problems when I just copy them back onto the new phone. I'm fearing there will be a database of some sort which won't recognize the photo's copied directly onto the phone, resulting in not showing them, the loss of the timestamps, etc...

I've looked a bit around on the internet, but haven't found a solution for this specific problem. I did find a lot of complaints about the folder structure thing though...

Anybody got an idea what would be the best approach? An option might also be upload the photos to iCloud, but I'm not sure if this doesn't require the photos to also exist on the phone itself and not solely in the cloud? (anyway, I'm not a big fan of uploading all my photo's - if only for the time that would take)

Thanks!

I'm not sure about the Windows specifics, but I can relate some experiences with the iCloud option and adding older unmanaged photos in recently.

The iPhone in Collections view always respects the date and time stamp in the photo metadata (exif) for sorting. The only place it ever look at a different date and time stamp is in the Albums - All Photos view. This defaults to date imported. Albums allow custom ordering but I believe they default to the exif data as well.

Any photo you copy off and work with the file should go right back into your collection when you upgrade to the newer phone. The details of that on Windows I don't know though. My guess is you would want to use iTunes to sync them back instead of trying to copy them back in the DCIM structure.

iCloud Photo Library I find is worth it for my needs. The phone will not have to keep the files locally, all originals go into the cloud storage side. On each Apple device you get a setting to keep originals locally, or replace them with space optimized files tailored for the device and it's free storage. This would free up space on the phone, and would rely on it's internet connection to pull down the original photos if needed (such as exporting them on the iPhone to another app). The downside for your use though is there is no way to access iCloud Photo Library with a Windows native app, all access there would be via the icloud.com web site.

We have the same issue with my wife's iPhone (16GB is just too small these days). What we ended up doing for her was a little kludgy, but it works.

First we installed Dropbox on her phone, which syncs every photo and video in her camera roll to their service. For us, this also syncs it to our Synology NAS. Whenever she runs out of space on her phone, she scans her Dropbox folder to see that everything made it into there, then we delete everything from the phone. At this point she'll also move the photos to a more permanent folder on the NAS that's seen by Picasa.

This frees up storage space on her phone and gets a good backup, but unfortunately it means she doesn't have any photos to show people. We might set her up with iCloud like Tom suggested, but she doesn't use iCloud for anything else, and she does use a lot of Google services and is running somewhat low one GMail storage, so we'll probably just end up increasing her Drive storage and backing up photos to Google Photos.

In the end, we could simple install the Google Photos app and leave Dropbox out of it, but I like having the local backup too.

The most challenging part of the process is always deleting the photos from her iPhone. It took a while to figure out that I have to go to collections, and I'm able to select groups of photos instead of individual ones. It's a little quicker but still not really fast enough.

On a side note: Google Music All Access has a really annoying storage behavior. It'll store a cache of recently played songs, but that cache gets HUGE! My wife recently ran out of space on her iPhone again, but it hadn't been long since the last "purge." I found that Google Music was taking up around 2.4GB of space! I have no clue why they'd feel the need to cache that much stuff.

I've had to do this before. I used a combination of the following techniques:

1. I do not attempt to organize the photos on the phone itself. I leave all photos in the "Camera Roll" folder. This is an important step for me as it simplifies all the other steps. (The phone itself will do some virtual arrangement of the photos into location and date sections, that part is automatic, unrelated, and doesn't affect what I'm talking about. I mean, I don't create new folders on the phone and move photos into those folders.)

2. I don't use iTunes or other photo-management software to synch the photos, I had some problems in the past when I tried to do that. Though if you do that, for example if you use one of the apple products to synch your photos, then it should all be automatic when you get your new phone. Anyway, the stuff I do below is only applicable because I don't use apple products to manage my photos.

3. At regular backup intervals (whenever I back up the phone's data in iTunes using the Backup function in iTunes), I also back up the photos from my phone into the following folders on my PC:

- Camera roll
- Videos
- Panoramas

Due to the randomly-named subfolders on the phone making this hard on Windows, I have to do this by opening up a Windows Explorer window to the phone's DCIM folder and performing a search for "*.JPG" or "*.MOV" for example. Then I make another Windows Explorer window to my local backup folder and arrange the two windows side by side on my screen at the same size, both set to display thumbnails of the photos of the same size. Then I can just scroll to the bottom and see the differences. Stuff that isn't in my backup folder, I drag over to it.

3. For putting photos back onto the restored phone: If my iTunes backup didn't restore the photos, then I use Copy Trans Photo to get them back into the Camera Roll folder normally. (Note: I Could have also used Copy Trans Photo for the regular backups up as well, but it's quicker for me to use Windows Explorer for that step).

This is a good option. I've currently set it up like that. As I'm typing this, my phone is uploading all my original photos to iCloud and will replace the local ones with smaller ones. I can live with that. When I get my new phone, I will replace the "thumbnails" with the original photo's again. Thanks for pointing me into this direction.

There may be no windows native app, but it is pretty easy to log into www.icloud.com and have a look at the photos. This is a very good option.


Also, thanks Matt for your input. Your option is a good one also, but I don't have a NAS currently, so I can't really use it. I do want to respond to this comment you've made though:

I found Apple Music does the same, which is why I quit using it at this moment. I'm currently on the three-month trial, but I don't think I will continue using it after that. The main reason is because it's an enormous drain on the battery. They phone becomes very hot even, so I'm guessing it makes the CPU run at its maximum level for this. This does not make it very good for daily use (in the office eg.). The second reason is indeed because Apple keeps local copies of the files on the phone for some reason. And having the little space left I currently have, this is not an option for me.

Also, thanks Tony for your guide! I will keep that in mind for when I have my new phone. I absolutely hate iTunes, and I try to avoid using it if I can. Which I why I like your way of making backups very much.

Thanks all!

I use Copy Trans Photo based on Tony's previous recommendations, and I love it. I use it for both backups and restoration, though.

No worries! Happy to offer another method. iCloud is probably the better way to go since it's native and you'll be able to do more with it. I like that it'll keep a smaller version on the phone so you'll still have them to show to people. That's the issue we're running into.

I should mention that you don't really need the NAS, since Dropbox runs on any computer. Dropbox also has its own photo management service, though I haven't used it.