Computer Help and Support

that information to more secure locations if the SD card is damaged or you drop the phone in water. I suggest using cloud services such as Google Drive and Google Photos since they are relatively intuitive to use. I suspect that a lot of your information may already be backed up if you use Google on your phone like for Google maps.

For other information that I don't want in the cloud, I resort to old-fashioned physical devices ranging from the PC hard drive, to flash drives and an external hard drive.

My experience deals mostly with transferring photos that my brother takes on his cellphone for work and I transfer the files to his PC so that the photos can be uploaded into the company's inventory system. I've used two different methods to accomplish the task:
1) Tether the phone to the computer with a USB cord. If a message pops up on the phone asking for an outside device (the computer) to be allowed access to the files, then click yes. At that point, open the File Explorer on the computer and you should see a folder that relates to your phone device (e.g., Moto, Android). Click that folder and drill down (maybe one or two levels) until you get to the Camera folder, the DCIM folder should be one level lower. Within that file folder you should see the thumbnails for your photos and you can copy, cut, paste, rename and view other file properties. Normally those files are save in either .jpg or .jpeg format. The quick fix to clean up your SD card would be to select all of the photos, then copy and paste those photos to another location where you want to store the information (this could take several minutes and possibly hours), confirming that everything was transferred to the new desired home, then return to the DCIM folder to select all of the files and delete. Since the PC is tethered to the phone it is allowed access to delete the files stored on the SD card. Removing all of the files from the SD card should free up a significant amount of memory.
2) A slower process that I've used is to use the share features on the cell phone to send a photo to an email address, then detach the file from the email so that it can be either placed on a physical device or uploaded to the Cloud. There is probably a way to do this so that multiple files are sent, but I've never had the need to do so. There will be lag time from when you hit send until it shows in the email since it will have to go through the email server.

Keep in mind that all the information only applies to files that were created using the Camera feature on your cell phone. Depending on how much storage space is available, you may want to compress the files by resizing them using a utility like Microsoft Paint. From what I've read it does not reduce the image quality.

I do not know the answer as to where podcasts are stored on a phone since I don't subscribe to any of them. If you feel like exploring, my advice is to tether the phone to the computer with a USB cord, locate the folder your device, then start drilling down the folders from there. There may be individual folders named Music, Videos, Podcasts. My gut instinct also believes that in some instances it may violate licensing and copyright constraints to transfer that material if it was purchased to use on a specific device.

FWIW, there are probably more efficient work arounds to the suggestions that I made depending on any syncing and networking that you have set up on your devices. I try to use work-arounds that don't cost money, avoid creating accounts and passwords, and placing physical barriers to avoid deleting information and providing backup when I'm learning something new or just fiddling around. I'm not afraid to adapting to new technology, but I've burnt myself a few times in the past so I try to exercise a lot of caution and redundancies.