How to back up your photos

Most households have photos in four or five places. The newest are on phones, a few years’ worth sit on an old laptop, the holiday shots from the proper camera are still on its SD card, and the scanned prints from a grandparent’s albums are on a USB stick in a drawer. Each of those places can fail on its own, and some of them have only ever held one copy.

This guide covers the common ways people back up photos, where those set-ups leave gaps, and how to bring every photo into Fabric, with the phone backing up automatically and the whole collection searchable by what the pictures show.

How people usually back up photos

iCloud Photos and Google Photos handle phone pictures well. Turn them on and new shots upload in the background. They work best inside their own ecosystem, so a family with an iPhone, an Android phone and a Windows laptop often ends up with photos split across both services. They also sync deletions by design, which keeps libraries tidy and means a photo removed on one device goes from the others.

Photographers tend to work from Lightroom or a similar catalog with originals on external drives, often two drives for safety. That’s reliable for the photos that pass through the catalog. Phone snaps, scans and pictures other people send rarely make it in, so those sit outside the backup.

Social media albums and messaging apps act as an accidental backup for many people. The copies there are usually compressed, and getting a specific one back means scrolling. Photo storage and organization compares these options in more detail.

Step 1: Turn on camera roll backup on your phone

Install the Fabric app on iOS or Android from the mobile download page. The app can back up the camera roll automatically. Choose to sync all photos, or only specific folders from the device’s photos if you’d rather leave out things like memes or receipts.

The app can also sync the device’s Files section, which catches photos saved there from email or messaging apps. Set this up on each family member’s phone and every phone feeds the same library. How to back up your camera roll automatically goes through the phone side in more depth.

Step 2: Bring in photos from laptops, cameras and old drives

Next, gather what’s elsewhere. In the Fabric web or desktop app, drag a folder of photos in or click Upload a file. Uploading handles large numbers of files at once, so ten years of exports from an old laptop can go across in one session.

For camera cards and external drives, the Fabric desktop app is easier. It mounts Fabric as a virtual drive on Mac, Windows and Linux, so you can copy photos off an SD card in Finder or File Explorer just as you would to any folder. Files on the drive take no space on your computer and stream when you open them, which helps if your laptop is already full of pictures.

Step 3: Add scanned prints and older pictures

Prints from old albums can be photographed with your phone or scanned on a flatbed, then uploaded like any other image. Fabric keeps the image and reads any text in it, so a handwritten caption on the back of a print or a date stamp on the front becomes searchable. How to digitize old family photos and letters covers scanning in more detail.

You can add a comment or tags as you save each photo, which is a good place to note who is in a picture or where it was taken while someone still remembers.

Step 4: Find photos by what’s in them

When each image arrives, Fabric creates embeddings, writes a short summary, extracts attributes such as concepts and colors, and suggests tags. Search then covers what’s visually in a photo, the text in it, and its color, so “kids on the beach with a red kite” can find the picture without a date or album name.

To search by color, paste a HEX code or pick one with the color picker. To find near-duplicates or other shots from the same afternoon, select a photo and run a similarity search; for images it takes composition, color and subject into account. How to find old photos without remembering when they were taken has more search ideas.

Step 5: Share albums with family from the backup

To give relatives access, share a folder or a space with them as viewers, commenters or editors. External people can open shared links without signing up. For a wider audience, publish the folder and it appears as a web page; you can allow downloads so relatives can save full copies.

People with access see the same library on the web, desktop or phone, so a cousin abroad and a parent at home look at one collection instead of a chain of forwarded attachments.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the easiest way to back up photos from my phone?

Turn on automatic camera roll backup in the Fabric mobile app. You can sync all photos or only the folders you choose.

Can I back up photos from an iPhone and an Android phone to the same place?

Yes. Fabric has apps for both iOS and Android, and both can back up the camera roll into the same Fabric library.

How do I back up photos from my camera’s SD card?

Install the Fabric desktop app, then copy the photos from the card into the Fabric drive in Finder or File Explorer. You can also drag them into the web app or use Upload a file.

Will backing up thousands of photos fill my computer?

The desktop drive streams photos from Fabric when you open them and keeps no copy on your disk, so the library can be much larger than your laptop’s storage.

Can I search my backed-up photos without tagging them?

Yes. Search covers what’s visually in each photo, any text in it, and its colors, so you can describe the picture you’re after. Tagging is optional.

How do I share a photo album with family members?

Share the folder with them and pick a role, such as viewer. They can open the shared link without signing up. Publishing the folder as a web page is another option, with downloads allowed if you want them to keep copies.

Should I keep my old external drive after backing up to the cloud?

Keeping it gives you a second copy in a different place, which is the basic idea of a backup. Many people keep one local copy and one cloud copy of photos they can’t replace.

Is photo backup included on the free plan?

The free plan includes file uploads with storage and file size caps, so a large photo library may need a paid plan. See pricing for current plans.