My Android camera phone automatically uploads all the photos I take to my Google account, or that’s how I have it set up. Sometimes it does, sometimes I have to give it a swat on its backside to remind it to back up the photos. I don’t know why it hesitates and I can’t be bothered to figure it out. My laziness is why I have it back up the photos in the first place. Automatic backup is easier than taking the time to download the photos onto my computer and then do whatever I’m going to do with them (mostly nothing).

But it stopped backing up photos last week and when I gave it a swat it still wouldn’t back them up, so I had to go poking around for an hour or so in my phone and in my Google account to find out why. It was because Google only gives you 15 megabytes of free space. You have to pay a monthly fee for more than that.

Or you could do what I did: I walked down to my local Walgreen’s and bought a 64 megabyte memory stick for twenty bucks and started downloading photos from Google onto the stick. I’ve moved a couple hundred photos in the last two days and there are still thousands left in my Google account. It’s rather sobering to think that I’ll never fill the stick even if I move them all.