3 ways to do more with your smart-phone photos

Consumer Reports News: March 28, 2013 08:08 AM

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What do you do with your photos after you capture them on your smart phone? Beyond posting them on Facebook or Instagram, or texting them to your friends and family, you may want to print some choice shots or use them in slideshows. Here are three steps to help you get more from your smart-phone photos:

Transfer them to a computer. You can organize photos on your phone, but those methods give you few options. And your display may be big for a phone, but it's nowhere near the size of a computer monitor, which makes it harder to view your shots. So step one is to transfer your images to a computer using a USB cord (or e-mail them to yourself).

Which smart phones do best with taking photos? Check our cell phone buying guide and Ratings.

Organize them. Several popular programs can help you get organized. A relatively inexpensive one is Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 ($80), which lets you import your images into the software, put them into groups, and tag them, so you can easily search and find specific images. You can also edit your photos, from minor tweaks to major alterations, depending on your experience and needs.

For a free program, try Picasa; you'll need to have a Google account to use it. For Mac owners, iPhoto—which comes with the computer—has some of the same tools as Photoshop Elements. It's not quite as versatile, but it's very easy to use.

Back them up. Your phone could be stolen, lost, or damaged, so make sure you back up your images regularly. Copy the images to a hard drive or flash drive, back them up to an online cloud service right from your phone, or burn them to a CD or DVD. To be even safer, consider a combination of backups.

—Terry Sullivan