Photos allow us to capture and preserve beautiful moments of our lives. To relive these memories in the future, you should ensure all your photos and videos are backed up to your iCloud account.
Apple’s iCloud service offers Apple users considerable storage depending on their needs. Each iCloud account provides 5GB of free storage and up to 2TB of storage space at a monthly fee.
After you backup your photos on iCloud, you will still be able to access them if your iPhone is lost or stolen. You will also always have access to them on other devices.
Follow this guide to learn how to back up photos and videos to iCloud on iOS 15.
How iCloud backs up your photos
Before uploading all your photos to iCloud, we’ll talk briefly about how iCloud works.
iCloud is a cloud-based storage service by Apple that syncs and stores your data, including passwords, photos, videos, and documents.
If you take a photo on your iPhone and upload it to iCloud, you can still access the image from any other device, including your iPad or Mac. Note that you will have to first log in to your account.
iCloud offers different plans for its users according to their needs, such as storage and privacy. If you’re an Apple user, you’ve likely used iCloud before to back up your iPhone or contacts.
Backing up iPhone photos to iCloud
To back up photos and videos to iCloud, follow these steps:
- Go to the Settings app.
Go to Settings - Tap on your name at the top of the screen.
Tap Name - Tap iCloud.
Tap iCloud - You will get a list of apps using iCloud in this section. Tap Photos.
Tap Photos - On the photos page, slide the toggle to the right. Doing this automatically uploads and stores all your photos to iCloud. After uploading your pictures onto iCloud, you can easily view or download them on any device.
Slide the iCloud Photos Toggle to the right
Changing the iCloud upload options
Apple gives its customers the option of storing original high-resolution or low-resolution photos that take up less storage space on their phones.
Here is how to choose which type of photos you want on your device and uploaded to your iCloud account:
- Go to the Settings app.
Go to Settings - Tap on your name at the top of the screen.
Tap Name - Tap iCloud.
Tap iCloud - Tap Photos.
Tap Photos - The Optimize Phone Storage and Download and Keep Originals options allow you to choose whether you want to keep low or high-resolution images or videos on your phone.Optimize Phone Storage lets your phone download smaller and space-saving images on your iPhone. The high-resolution images that take up more space won’t be deleted – instead, they are stored on iCloud instead of your phone.If you want to download and keep the full-size original photos on your iPhone, select Download and Keep Originals.
Select Download and Keep Originals - Apple also allows its users to create Shared Albums. This allows you to quickly share photos and videos with people you choose (subscribers). Subscribers can also add their videos, photos, and comments to the shared albums. You and your subscribers can easily download items from these shared albums. Slide the Share Albums toggle to the right to turn on Shared Albums.
