Some Smart Ways to Spruce Up Your Phone For Spring—Part 2

This week, to continue with our “Spring Clean” series I’m sharing some simple tips that will help you get the most out of two important features of your cellphone—your contacts and your photos.

The common thread for both is to form good habits.  Just like brushing your teeth or doing laundry regularly, managing contacts or photos is much easier if you develop a few good, basic habits and stick to them.

Contacts

If you’re not careful, contacts—your “electronic phone book”—will pile up quickly. Keeping these well-managed and up-to-date helps make sure you can find the information you’re looking for right away. No more spending forty minutes looking for “Kathy from Garden Club”! Try these tips:

• It may seem obvious, but scroll through your contacts list regularly, and delete any that you don’t really need. If you’re only going to call that restaurant or hardware store one time, you probably don’t need to store the number and clutter up your contact list.

• For those you do want to keep, update them with the most current phone numbers, email addresses, or other important information you’ll want later on.

• You should also regularly sync your phone’s contacts with your Apple or Google contacts to create a handy backup. This way you won’t lose any information if something happens to your phone.

Photos

Your phone can store a tremendous number of photos and videos, so it’s important to stay on top of them. Right now I have over 800 pictures and about 50 short video clips stored on my phone, sorted into folders the same way I used to sort prints into photo albums. This way, I can easily find the ones I want to share, and keep storage available for important pictures I’ll take in the future. Here are a few suggestions:

• Know where your saved images go! There’s nothing worse than taking what you know is a perfect, once in a lifetime shot, then not being able to figure out where it went. Be sure to familiarize yourself with your phone’s photo storage before you begin taking pictures.

• Review your photos regularly and delete the ones you don’t need. There’s really no reason to use up your phone’s memory on an extra 6 or 7 shots you had to take at the family reunion because Uncle Bob didn’t have his eyes open! Save the “good” one, and delete the rest.

• Back up your photos to a computer, external hard drive, or cloud-based storage. This will free up memory, and more importantly, make sure you don’t lose your photos if your phone is damaged or lost.

Now that you’re an expert on managing apps, contacts, and photos, next time we’ll take a look at ways to improve your web browsing experience on your phone. Your homework will be to bookmark Consumer Cellular’s website to your mobile browser so you can read this blog there!