How to Copy your photos from your camera to your phone, without using a computer

Copying your photos from your camera to your phone can be important for several reasons:

Easy sharing: Once you have copied your photos from your camera to your phone, it becomes much easier to share them with others. You can quickly send them to friends and family via text, email, or social media.

Backup: Your phone can act as a backup for your photos, ensuring that you have an extra copy of your important memories in case something happens to your camera.

Convenience: It’s much more convenient to have your photos on your phone than having to carry your camera around with you all the time. You can easily access your photos wherever you are.

Editing: Having your photos on your phone allows you to edit them on-the-go using various photo editing apps, giving you the ability to enhance or manipulate your images as desired.

Do you love to travel? Next time you take your photography on the road, leave the laptop behind and instead, transfer your photos directly to your phone for backup and editing. No computer or camera WiFi required!

A USB Type-C to USB Type-A adapter can be agreat tool, and if you’re a Samsung Galaxy phone user like me, they come as part of the standard kit. I’ve got a slowly growing collection of them, now that I’ve had a couple of phones which use the USC-C charging port.

The adapter is included so that you can use a standard USB Type-A to USB Type-C cable, such as a charging cable, to transfer your old phone data onto your new phone. But these little things are useful for a lot more than that. They effectively add a standard USB port to your phone (or tablet). It may not support the whole range of USB devices out there in the world (even my computer struggles with that), but I’ve used mine to plug in a wireless mouse, a keyboard, and best of all: A card reader.

With a card reader and the USB Type-C to USB Type-A adapter, you can copy photos directly from your camera’s memory card to your phone. It’s a lot faster than WiFi transfer, and less fiddly too. I generally spend about twice as long trying to get my WiFi-enabled camera to connect to my phone than it takes to copy the photos off the card directly!

I recommend setting up a dedicated folder on your phone or your phone’s microSD card for your camera photos. Copy the photos to your phone using the adapter and card reader, then import them into Lightroom for mobile. Your originals will upload from your phone to your Lightroom cloud storage: Backup done. You can then edit direct on your phone for exporting and sharing while on the go, or when you do get home to your computer, your photos will be there ready for you in Lightroom.

Once uploaded to the cloud, you could delete the original photos off your phone to save space. But make sure that you’re following the 3-2-1 backup strategy for your photos before deleting anything: Three copies, two on separate devices (i.e. on your phone and your camera card) and one offsite (i.e. in the Lightroom cloud). That will keep your photos as safe as they are portable!