How to Back Up Android Photos Without Google Photos

You don't need Google Photos to back up an Android phone. Connect the phone to a computer with a USB cable, copy the camera folder onto the computer, then upload that folder to the storage you want: Proton Drive, iCloud Photos, Dropbox, OneDrive, pCloud, Backblaze B2, a NAS, or just an external drive. The copy step needs no account at all.

The upload is where large photo libraries go wrong: Wi-Fi drops, the laptop sleeps, and a browser upload of 20,000 files starts again from the beginning. The second half of this guide covers doing that part with Blober, which picks up where it stopped.

These are Google's steps^[1]:

1. Unlock the phone.
2. Connect it to the computer with a USB cable.
3. On the phone, tap the "Charging this device via USB" notification.
4. Under "Use USB for", choose File Transfer.
5. A file window opens on the computer. Your camera photos are usually in DCIM, in a folder called Camera. Screenshots and photos saved from apps are usually under Pictures.
6. Copy those folders to a folder on the computer, for example Pictures\Phone backup.
7. Eject the phone in Windows, then unplug the cable.

If nothing appears, try another cable. Google notes that not every USB cable can transfer files^[2].

Google's help page now covers only Windows and Chromebook for USB transfers^[3]. On a Mac you have two good options:

• Image Capture, which comes with macOS. It imports photos and videos from a camera or other device connected by cable^[4]. On most Android phones, pick the USB mode called PTP or Transfer photos so the Mac sees the phone as a camera. Then choose a folder to import into.
• OpenMTP, a free, open-source Android file transfer app for macOS^[5]. Use it if you also want folders outside the camera roll.

Copy into the same computer folder every time. That keeps step 2 simple.

Any cloud's desktop app or website can take the folder. For a few hundred photos, that is fine.

For a whole library, use something that keeps going. In Blober, it looks like this:

1. Create a workflow. Choose Local as the source and select the folder from step 1.
2. Choose the destination. Proton Drive and Proton Photos, iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos, Dropbox, OneDrive, pCloud, Box, Backblaze B2 and a NAS all work. Google Photos is not on the list: Blober can read from it but not write to it.
3. Optional: add a path template to sort photos into a folder per day as they upload. See Organize Cloud Files by Date.
4. Keep deduplication on Skip if a file with the same name exists, the default. See Deduplication.
5. Start the transfer.

If the connection drops, Blober waits and carries on. Files that fail are retried automatically, and a paused or interrupted task resumes from the files it already finished instead of starting again. How Blober works has the details. The computer has to stay on and awake while it runs.

Plug the phone in, copy the camera folder into the same computer folder again, and run the same workflow. With "Skip if a file with the same name exists", photos that are already in the cloud are skipped and only the new ones upload.

Most Android cameras put the date and time in each file name, so names don't repeat. If your phone reuses names, a date-based path template keeps them in separate folders so nothing gets skipped by mistake.

• It isn't automatic. Nothing runs on the phone; you plug it in and run the workflow when you want a backup.
• Blober can't upload to Google Photos. If you want a copy there too, use Google's own app.
• Copying to the computer first is required. Blober reads folders on your computer, not the phone itself.

Can I back up Android photos without a Google account? Yes. Copying over USB needs no account, and the upload only needs an account with the storage you pick.

Do I have to delete the photos from my phone? No. Copying leaves them on the phone. Delete them later, once you have checked the backup, if you want the space back.

Is this full quality? Yes. A USB copy moves the original files, and Blober uploads those same files without compressing them.

What if the upload stops halfway? Resume the task in Blober. It continues from the files it already finished and retries the ones that failed.

Does this work with Samsung, Pixel and other Android phones? Yes. The USB steps are the same on any Android phone, though the menu names can differ slightly between makers.

Where should the photos go? Somewhere you already pay for, or somewhere private. For options, read Alternatives to Google Photos and Proton Photos vs Google Photos.

• Alternatives to Google Photos: The Full De-Googling Round-Up
• The 3-2-1 Backup Rule for People Who Live in the Cloud
• Back Up Cloud Storage Directly to Your NAS
• How Blober Handles Duplicate Files in Long-Running Backups