If you own a Samsung phone – go back up your photos to another service right now

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Users of Samsung Cloud are being asked to download their photos or risk losing them forever. That’s because Samsung is removing the ability to back up your photo roll to Samsung Cloud, presumably in an effort to save on storage costs.

Samsung Cloud will still back up your contacts, calendar entries, and notes, but images and video content are no longer part of the package Samsung offers. Samsung has created a tool to transfer your data to Microsoft’s OneDrive, possibly because of the deep partnership between the two companies.

If you don’t want to use OneDrive, you have to manually download all of your photos and videos, and transfer them to your storage provider of choice.

Here’s how to save your images from Samsung Cloud before the deadline

You can download your Samsung Cloud photos from your phone or your computer. If your phone is short on storage space, we recommend the desktop method.

How to save images on mobile

How to save images on desktop

If you’d prefer to do this on desktop, you can do that in just a couple of clicks.

1. Go to the Samsung Cloud website and log in
2. Click on Gallery
3. You’ll be offered the chance to download any images. You can’t preview them before downloading, and if you have a lot of stored images, Samsung will break it down into multiple ZIP files
4. Depending on if you’re Group 1 or Group 2, you have until September 30, 2021, or November 30, 2021, respectively. Check the Samsung Cloud pages to find out which group you are in, which are sorted by the country you are using your device in

Whatever cloud service you decide to change your photo backups to, you’ll probably need to pay for it. We’ve all got sprawling photo rolls these days, and most services cut you off after 15GB of storage use.

While Samsung is trying to get you to switch to Microsoft’s OneDrive, you could use Google Photos, Dropbox, or any of the multitude of well-established cloud storage providers. It’s important to make sure whichever service you use has an auto-upload feature, so you don’t risk losing any of your precious images.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.