A friend of mine worried over the weekend that she couldn’t take any more photos on her phone — she didn’t have any memory left.

I silently wondered what exactly could be on her phone: Bootlegged movies? Music? Entire seasons of shows? Is she a hardcore gamer all of a sudden? Does she have some sordid hobby that I don’t know about? I thought of breezy ways to ask the question, that seemed open and nonjudgmental to her new interests.

“It’s just a lot of photos and videos of my nieces and nephews. I don’t want to delete them.”

Oh. Right. Of course.

Here is a simple routine that’ll help you get out of the photo/phone memory quagmire, and help you push all of your photos and videos to your laptop/desktop computer. Bonus: this way, you might actually do something with all those photos and videos. (For all of us photo hoarders out there, this is great because it involves NO deleting! Yay.)

1. Set up a free Dropbox account on your laptop/computer.

2. Download the Dropbox app onto your phone. Log in.

3. On your phone, go into your Dropbox settings and opt to have all of your phone photos/videos automatically uploaded to your Dropbox account. Also, remember to only let it sync if you’re connected to WiFi (that way, it’ll only automatically upload the photos when you’re connected to the internet, so you won’t get stuck with huge cell phone data charges).

From now on, every time you take a photo, Dropbox will automatically upload each photo to your Dropbox account. Without you having to do anything, and within a matter of minutes after you take the photo, you’ll already have a back up.

4. Whenever you feel like it, go into Dropbox from your laptop/computer and copy/paste the photos onto your computer’s hard drive. (If you forget to do this for a while, Dropbox will notify you that you’re reaching your free memory limit.)

5. Delete photos off your phone at will, knowing that they’ve already been saved somewhere else.

6. Never have a phone memory issue again.

I hope this works for you!