Don't throw your old phone away

A second smartphone camera can do wonders for you

In just two weeks, on 9/12, Apple will unveil the latest iPhone and the company will do its best to convince consumers that the new iPhone 15 is the fastest, most powerful, sleekest device ever, with the best camera to boot. And many of us will rush to get one.

But what to do with last year’s model, or the oldies from years past? Do you trade them in, for 25-60% of what you paid for them, or just hold onto them to use as a second camera?

That’s the question reader Debbie asked me recently, and we talked about it in-depth on my Thursday live show.

In a nutshell, I never ditch the old phone, because I can always find uses for them. How many photographers do you know with just one camera? (I have four full-size models!) And as many as you know, I produce the #PhotowalksTV series on mobile phones, three of them—two iPhones and a Samsung Galaxy S23+, augmented with a GoPro Hero 11, Insta360 X3 and DJI Mavic Air 2S.

I’ll dive into what I do with them in a minute, but let’s take a quick look at what your older phone might currently fetch.

Per Apple’s website, you can theoretically get $640 in trade-in on an iPhone 13 Pro Max from 2021, $530 for the Pro model, $460 for the 12 Pro Max (2020) and $360 for 12 Pro. It’s not listed, but assume you can possibly garner $700 or so for iPhone 14 models. Provided of course that the phone is in good condition, without a cracked screen.

And assume Apple charges the usual $999-$1,200 for the new model of your choice when the iPhone 15 goes on sale Sept. 22nd. You’re probably looking at $400 to $500 for your trade-in.

Five hundred dollars trade-in on your old phone or keep it? I can give you 500 reasons why to hold onto it, with 99% photography related. (Ditto for any of you with an Android phone.)

Timelapses

Have one camera running to make a timelapse video (watching the world fly by) while the other camera gets a different timelapse angle. I usually shoot two or three timelapses at the same time on different phones, picking different looks at the same scene. For instance, clouds flying over a San Diego Lighthouse, while on the other side of the road, there’s an awesome sunset as well. I did just this recently.

Second camera angle

Instead of just a close-up in an interview, get the wide shot at the same time on the second camera.

Calamities

Back-up camera when the other has gone dead, is being problematic or has run out of room. Back-up phone when bad things happen to good people. Say your phone was stolen or misplaced.

Holding the Selfie Stick on a sturdier iPhone mount after the calamity

Speaking of real-life situations, stop me if you’ve heard this one, but on my recent July trip, I had an iPhone 12 Pro attached to a Selfie Stick while whitewater rafting. The waves got really intense, the iPhone slipped out of the selfie stick, and fell into the water. It’s now happily at the bottom of the sea. Luckily, I had a backup (three actually) phones to keep me going.

To answer one of the most common questions: no, I don’t pay for service on the multiple phones. Only one iPhone (the 14 Pro Max) gets the T-Mobile signal. The others are pure wifi cameras that happen to also have apps. Their only use is for photo and video taking.

The other phones keep time, thanks to Wifi and I’ve signed in for access to apps. The only ones I use are photo related: Adobe Lightroom Mobile and Google Snapseed for editing, SmugMug, Google Photos and Mylio Photos for photo management and backup.

(Wisecracked a viewer of the live show. “Were all the photos backed up” before the iPhone fell into the river? Yes indeed. Just nothing from the rafting trip. Ahem—no wifi out on the water!)

So what’s it like traipsing around with three phones while on the road?

Pretty simple. I need to bring a lot of charging cords with me and have the phones re-charging all night.

Then when I leave the hotel, I usually have one phone in a backpack, another placed in the Selfie Stick/combo tripod that I use instead of a gimbel, for video, and my main still camera lives in my pocket.

While out and about, I usually switch back and forth between the 13 (video) and 14 (for stills) unless I need a stronger zoom. When that happens, I reach for the Galaxy, which has a 10x throw vs. 3X for the iPhone.

I also like the Timelapse feature on the Galaxy, which offers variable speeds of fast-paced action, compared to no choices in the iPhone timelapse mode.

Next comes the edit at the end of the day, and backup.

On the iPhone, I scroll through the photos and add HEARTS to the ones I like for the first-pass edit. Then I create an album in the Apple Photos app with the favorited photos, and transfer them to my computer (and way larger screen) for a closer look and final pass.

I repeat the process on the Galaxy within Google Photos.

For backup, I try transferring everything to SmugMug and Mylio Photos, but that’s proven to be challenging in motel rooms. At the places I stay in, they seem to like to throttle the internet when they detect that someone is uploading a lot of data, so the transfer often loses steam sometime in the night.

I also backup everything to my computer and an external 2 TB drive, but the Android transfer for the Galaxy is a bear. I haven’t been able to make the Android File Transfer work with the Mac, so I have to reply on internet uploads when the systems are operational.

Weeks later, back at home, once I’ve completed my video edit, and everything is safely on my computer and backed up to multiple places, I’ll delete the travel footage from the phones.

Debbie wants to know if I also backup the extra phones? No. There’s no reason to. I take the picture, I back up the picture, and I move on.

How do I use the other devices?

The GoPro is my driving camera. I place it on the windshield for driving shots (required for travel videos!) of street scenes. I could get similar ones with the iPhone, but someone has to be driving the car to let me stick my head out the window.

Insta360 X3 is a dual-lens camera that gives two looks of the same scene. Thus, if I wanted to get a shot of me walking down the street while also seeing what my eyes see as I walk forward, that’s the camera I need.

The DJI Mavic Air for the flying camera, mini-helicopter look.

iCLOUD BACKUP

A friend of mine reached out this week, a friend who should know better, saying he wanted to use his phone to shoot an event for several days, but wanted to make sure he had room on the phone for it all, and wanted to start by clearing his 250 gigabyte phone.

At the time, he had used 200 GB of his allotted 250 GB, and planned on deleting like crazy to make room.

“I pay Apple $10 a month for 2 terabytes of backup, so I should be covered, right?”

No, no and no! Absolutely not!

As I’ve explained here several times, Apple’s iCloud is NOT backup, it’s just a mirror of what’s on your Apple devices. If my friend deletes 200 GBs of photos on his phone, Apple will respond by killing the 200 GBs on his iCloud too.

So what to do? I recommended he copy his data immediately and place it elsewhere, in multiple copies.

There’s also a little known, time-consuming hack with iCloud. Apple has a secondary service called iCloud Drive, which appears as a virtual drive on your Mac computer, and is available to anyone paying the same monthly fee for iCloud.com. He could download all the 200 GBs of photos and videos, and then re-upload them to iCloud Drive, where they won’t be deleted. Then, when he does get rid of them from iCloud.com, they will also disappear from his iPhone, giving him room for the shoot.

For a less cumbersome approach to backup, I use SmugMug, which offers unlimited backup without the threat of deleting your stuff, and Mylio Photos+, which backs up to my local hard drives and makes the images accessible on multiple devices. The only snag is you need good internet to make them work effectively!

Jeff at 13

Scans

Last weekend, I decided to sit down and make a physical photo album from the western trip. It’s a process I haven’t done in a few years, because it’s so time-consuming. I’m not a fan of Shutterfly’s software, but the end result is pretty good. Plus, a lot of our older vacation albums were made on Shutterfly, so I wanted to match them.

After I finished the album (it took several hours), I wondered about the photos taken from another western trip my wife Ruth and I did years ago. Wouldn’t it be nice to make a companion album of that trip too?

But where were the photos? I’d digitized a few, but most were still in print form. So I went on a tear to find them, through closets, portolios, shoeboxes, slide trays, you name it, and finally got the bottom of it. It turns out many were in the form of slides or negatives.

I sent them on Monday to Scanmyphotos.com, which quoted a 21 cent per slide fee, along with a discount code at the top of the page, went to the UPS Store, paid $11 for shipping, plus another $3 for the box.

It arrived Tuesday, and by the afternoon, the images were available to me via a Wetransfer.com link for me to download.

Talk about amazing service!

Beyond the western trip, I found photos of my late dad I didn’t remember taking, a jewel of a photo of me at age 13 or so with very long hair that’s priceless (never seen it, at least not in the second part of my life) and other gems.

The moral to the story is that in the last 3 weeks we have lived through fires, floods, hurricanes and so on. Isn’t it time to get our photos backed up, copied and protected? If not now, when?

Thanks as always for reading, watching and listening. I’ll be back at you tomorrow with more about Moab. Happy Labor Day weekend!