A friend of mine was having problems recently because her iPhoneSee it at Amazon UK was out of space. Apps weren't updating, some were frozen, and she hit other roadblocks all because of her storage ceiling. She asked me to take a look, and the culprit immediately jumped out at me: photos. "You have so many photos on here! You need to move them somewhere else!" I said. She didn't know how.
My friend lives in a mobile-only world, so she never connects her iPhone to a computer to offload images and backup her iPhone. She also doesn't have a home computer where she might use iCloud Photostream to back up her images to iPhoto. Nevertheless, there is one amazingly easy solution, and I'll share it with you here. As a bonus, moving the photos to a new location makes it much easier to rename and organize the images, too.
How to Move Photos Off Your Phone, Wirelessly
1. The easiest and fastest way to move photos off your phone without any cords is to use a file-syncing or backup program. So start by signing up for one of these services: IDrive, Dropbox, SugarSync, or Box. There are many other great file-syncing and backup services, but I recommend these specifically because they all offer good mobile apps. All these services have a free version, too, except SugarSync (which offers only a 90-day free trial).
2. Download and install the backup program's iPhone app. Sign into your account.
3. Turn on the app's photo upload feature. In Dropbox, it's Camera Upload in the Settings. SugarSync's is called Camera Backup in Settings. Box has Automatic Upload under File & Folder Options. And with IDrive, you'll see Auto Camera Upload as a main choice in the Backup section.
How it Works
Once this setting is enabled, the app will copy—not just sync, but make a copy—of your photos into your file-syncing account. Some of the apps have a setting that let you control whether the photos are copied only when your iPhone is connected to Wi-Fi, or even if it only has a cellular signal. That setting is helpful if you have a limited data plan. Now, any time you take a photo, it's copied into your file-syncing or backup account right away.
There are a few other features you can enable or disable related to the camera upload tool (see the video). Most of them will make your life more convenient when enabled, but will tax your phone's battery. Decide what you need. There will always be a tradeoff.
Additionally, when you log into Dropbox (or whichever service you use) on your computer or the Web, you'll see all your iPhone photos in a folder. They'll be there even if you delete the photos from your iPhone, which you should do if you need to free up space!
Tips for Organizing Photos
What I really like about having photos in Box, SugarSync, or another cloud storage account is that you can really organize them how you want. I hate that iOS doesn't let me rename photos or even tag them. The most you can do on an iPhone is shuffle images into folders. You can do better than that.
I like all my photo names to have a four- or six-digit year-month-day prefix, such as 1503 or 150330 (which translate to March 2015 and March 30, 2015, respectively). I use year-month-day so that my files always fall into chronological order. The reason this prefix makes sense is because I tend to remember photos by date. Christmas pictures will always have a "12" in the name, and finding photos from my birthday is a piece of cake. You'll never forget the year your niece or nephew graduated because you'll have a reminder built right into your photos.
After the prefix, I usually add some kind of primary descriptor to the image name, such as "holiday" or "vacation," some general term that start of give me a clue as to what the image is. Finally, I end with a more specific description of the photo, such as the name of the person in it. For example, a group shot of my family from a reunion in January 2014 might be named 140105_reunion_group-shot.
Being able to rename photos is just one benefit of moving them to a cloud-based storage space. You can also move them around into different folders, which is huge if you like to stay organized. If you're a mobile-only person like my friend, you'll find it's a little cumbersome to move photos via the mobile app, but it can be done! It's much faster using Dropbox, SugarSync, Box, or IDrive on a computer, where you can drag and drop the photos where you want them.
Additional Resources
For more tips on organizing your photos or backing up content from your iPhone, check out these related articles: