The easiest Android photo backup solution?

Having cradled an iPhone 4 for what must have been 3-4 years I’ve recently ‘converted’ to an HTC One M8 and am now living an Android life.

My iPhone had served me incredibly well. Indeed that is a bloody impressive lifespan for a mobile phone! But the time had come to put it to bed as the gap in performance with the comparative phones of today was becoming too much.

I stopped taking photos or even caring about taking photos in the twilight years of my iPhone’s life as it became a bit slow and unresponsive. The HTC One M8 has peaked my interest again.

With the sheer volume of cloud hosting services available right now it is unforgivable in today’s age to not have an appropriate backup system in place for an item as important as a mobile phone.

HTC Backup does a great job of taking nightly snapshots of my phones integral personal and application data but what it doesn’t do is look after my photos.

Android actually has a native photo backup solution in the form of Google+ but to be frank it left me uneasy.

With Google+ installation comes the app Photos which integrates directly with your personal profile and features the option to automatically upload an infinite number of your personal photos to the service and store them privately.

Whilst that kind of storage capability is unbeatable (albeit normally at a slightly reduced resolution) it doesn’t take away from the fact that reviewing your photos involves trawling through that clunky social media platform that nobody cares to use and that the ease of making your albums public to the world is an unnerving click of a button or two away.

I’m sure a great number of people will disagree with me on this and are more than happy to host their personal photos privately with Google+ but it wasn’t ever going to work for me.

I am surprised though that Android seems not to have a more likeable default photo backup option utilising Google Drive although one suspects the Google+ link-up is another attempt by the “don’t be evil” crew to try and steal some of the limelight Facebook refuses to give up.

It’s without doubt that backing up to Google Drive feels a lot more natural and comfortable whilst offering the added bonus on allowing you to sync your photos once more to your laptop or desktop computer if you run the Google Drive application for Mac OS X or Windows.

So how to do it?

The answer lies in a great little free application called Gallery Drive Sync which will sync any photo directory of your choosing to Google Drive immediately and/or every 60 minutes with an option to backup via Wifi only if your data plan is particularly restrictive.

Upgrading to the Pro version at a price point of $1.95 sees that you can set your own time interval, sync videos and also allow for keeping your Google Drive and phone folders perfectly mirrored in what you delete from your cloud storage can also be replicated on your phone.

Personally I am yet to upgrade but can see how that last feature would be in particularly useful as you amass photos as for me I’d much prefer to sort and delete files from my laptop rather than mess about on a phone.

The only limitation with using an app like this would be your storage allowance. As a non-paying Google account holder this currently sits at 15GB of which I’m sure is ample for most.

There are no doubt a catalogue of similar Android apps for utilising alternative services. In fact I’m pretty sure the official Dropbox app has in-built camera upload functionality but unless you’re paying the monthly service fee or have significantly bumpered your storage space from friend referrals then the 2GB available from the basic plan over time isn’t likely gonna cut it.