New Video Alert: Hollywood Sign!
Plus, more on Apple deleting your photos
Ever wonder what it would be like to stand directly in front of the most famous nine letters in the world?
In the latest episode of Photowalks, I’m taking you on a rare, behind-the-scenes VIP tour of the Hollywood Sign. Most people are kept far away by fences and security cameras, but thanks to a generous invitation from the Hollywood Sign Trust, we’re going through the locked gates and climbing down the ropes to the base of the letters on Mount Lee.
I’ll show you the "imperfections" you can’t see from the street, the secret history of how Playboy’s Hugh Hefner and rocker Alice Cooper saved the sign from disrepair, and the surprising reason why one "L" is taller than the others.
Plus, I’m sharing my "feet-on-the-ground" guide for your next visit on how you can get up close and personal with the symbol of Los Angeles.
More on iCloud + Apple deleting your photos
After yesterday’s piece about how to deal with Apple nag messages when you run out of room on your phone and you want to deal with it without Apple responding by deleting your photos from iCloud, we got some questions!
They mostly dealt with my suggestion: get your photos off the iPhone NOW, by moving them to an external hard drive.
That way, you can make room on your phone, and not have to worry about Apple deleting your photos. (Which it will—because that’s how iCloud works. It’s not a backup service, it’s a mirror of your phone that syncs images to all your Apple devices.)
Meryl asks: “How do I know if I have enough storage on my PC? I definitely don’t on my MacBook. And how do I do the download before I also transfer to whichever external hard drive.”
To see how room you have:
On a Windows PC:
Click the Start button
Open Settings
Go to System
Click Storage
Here you will see:
Total drive size (example: 512GB or 1TB)
How much is used
How much is free
Before you move the photos to your computer, you’ll need to know how large your photo library is in iCloud.
What you want:
At least as much free space as the size of your photo library.
How to know your photo library size:
On your Mac
Click the Apple menu
Go to System Settings
Click your Apple ID
Click iCloud
Click Manage
Then select Photos.
Go to Settings
Tap General
Tap iPhone Storage
Scroll to Photos
It will show how many GB your photos and videos are using.
So if I was going to download everything to my computer, I’d need 1.2 TB of space.
Meryl, I’m sure your collection isn’t as large as mine. The good news—you can do it in chunks. Apple will only let you download 1,000 images at a time. Create a folder on your external hard drive, call it iCloud, and when you do the download, make sure the photos are going straight to your drive, and not to the desktop.
To make sure you can do this, and not have the files show up in your desktop, tell your browser where the photos should go.
In Chrome:
Go to Settings → Downloads
Turn on “Ask where to save each file before downloading”
Now it will let you choose the external drive.
What happens after you’ve moved all the photos and now you have two copies safely away from iCloud?
You can now delete them off the phone, and your device will have lots of room. (Yes, Apple will delete them from iCloud.) You can continue to use iCloud for all new images snapped, just know you’ll need to repeat this hard drive backup process at least once or twice a year.
An unsung member of the Photowalks team is my pal Paul Ellis, who is one of the great classical guitarists, and a whiz at being able to play multiple styles. I’ll say, “Let’s do driving music,” and we’re in a funky blues. Or, “Japan!” and he’ll say, “How about this take on Sakura?”
So thank you Tubular121 for noticing Paul’s incredible artistry, from the Kyoto episode!
Any more questions about photo backup, travel, you name it—let me hear from you!
Jeff