The bad thing about taking a photo with your phone is that if you don’t do something about it, by default, all the images are saved in the phone’s internal memory. In other words, unless you make an automatic backup in Google photos, you will lose all those photos forever the day you have a serious problem with the phone.
The fastest solution is to save all photos on the microSD card. Thus, if the phone suffers a breakdown or all the content stored in the internal memory is deleted, you will be able to recover the photos simply by extracting the microSD and connecting it to another phone or to a PC.
But beware, remember that from Android 7.0, all phones are encrypted as standard. This means that if you have the microSD configured as internal memory, there will be no way to recover the photos since they will be encrypted. To avoid this problem, the microSD should not be encrypted or configured as internal memory.
Read Also: How to Encrypt an Android Device and Its SD Card to Protect Your Data
How to save all photos directly to the phone’s microSD memory
Although not all smartphones have a memory card slot, those that do can set up automatic saving of photos to the microSD by following these steps.
- Open the Camera app.
- Click on the gear icon to open the camera settings menu.
- Locate the “Storage Location” option. By default, the internal memory will be selected. Press and select “ SD card ”.
And that’s it! From now on, all the photos you take with the camera will be saved on the microSD.
For this example, we have used a Samsung Galaxy S10+. The process should be very similar for the rest of the smartphones. With a Xiaomi phone that we have here in the office, for example, the steps to follow are practically the same:
- Open the Camera app.
- Click on “ Options ”.
- In the Options menu, click on the gear icon in the upper right corner of the screen.
- Within the “Camera Settings”, check the box “ Save to SD card ”.
How to move photos from internal memory to microSD
Now that you have the camera configured to your liking, it is time to move on to the next phase. If the phone suffers a breakdown, you will lose the photos in the mobile’s internal memory. To solve it, move all those images to the microSD card to keep them safe along with the rest of the images you will take from now on with the camera.
To move the photos, you need a file explorer. You can use the browser installed by default on your phone (if it has one) or install a free one, such as ASTRO.
- Open the ASTRO browser (or the browser you will use to perform the transfer to the SD).
- Go to “Files” and locate the DCIM folder. This is the folder where all the photos and videos you take with the camera are stored.
- Long press on the DCIM folder to select it.
- Click on the dropdown (icon with 3 points) in the upper right margin and select “Move to.”
- At the top of the screen, click on “Device memory.”
- Choose the option “SD card.”
Note: If you use another browser other than ASTRO, navigate to the folders on the microSD.
- Once inside the location of the microSD, click on “ Move ”.
Once the transfer of the images and videos is complete, all that content will be accessible from the microSD. Remember that to access them later, from a PC or another smartphone, the SD mustn’t be encrypted or configured as internal memory, as we mentioned at the beginning.
