What is the best way to save photos and videos from my iPhone for my kids to be able to access forever? I want them to have access to everything later in life, like i have with my family’s home movies and photos, to share with their children one day. Is icloud the best way to go about this, or should i have some kind of external storage?
iPhone 13 Pro, iOS 17
You need an external drive-- and iCloud is good, too. For long term archive, you can export pictures as jpgs to a set of folders on an external drive, duplicate it on another drive, and keep one of the drives off-site. Instead of (or in addition to) the 2nd drive, you can copy those pictures to a Cloud drive, like iCloud Drive (this is different from iCloud Photos,) or Google Drive, or One Drive or Dropbox or those sorts of things. That gives you an off-site backup.
I've had backup hard drives go bad after a long time of non-use, so that's why I think you need, for absolute safety, more than one backup. And "cloud" backups, being run by some company you don't really know, are out of your hands, really, so you don't want that to be your only backup. Apple is not likely to go belly-up, but, well, you never know.
iCloud Photos is another useful thing-- this is a synchronization service that automatically keeps copies of all your pictures from your iPhone -- it keeps the iCloud Photos Library always exactly like the pictures on your phone, without you having to do anything. This is spectacular! But-- if you accidentally erase pictures on your phone, they are also erased in iCloud, too. So iCloud Photos is a good backup, but it doesn't backup against mistakes. I use iCloud Photos, but I also have backups on external drives.
You don't mention a computer-- I'm guessing you don't have a Mac. But computers can have apps with automatic backup systems, so if you keep a copy of your pictures on your computer, then they can be automatically copied to the external drive backup. Then you would need to periodically copy those to an off-site backup.
Here's how it works for me: My pictures from my iPhone are automatically copied to iCloud Photos, and then to my Mac. On my Mac I add pictures from my Nikon and from old family Photos that I have scanned, and from old digital cameras. These are automatically copied back to iCloud Photos and then copied to my iPhone and iPad so I can view them on the go. My Mac automatically copies all this to an external drive. I periodically (maybe once a month) copy new stiff to a second drive.
There are other, non-Mac systems, maybe like Google Photos, that do some of same stuff, but I'm not sure about them.
Could be more options than you wanted to know about. Let us know what you're thinking...
Saving iPhone videos
