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I’ve been having some problems with the “Gallery” app on my Samsung Galaxy S4. Actually I wasn’t sure whether it was the app or the hardware that was giving me the problem. Sometimes a photo would come out as a 1GB file (ish) and sometimes when copying files from the phone to the PC the process would stall and I’d get “file format not recognised” or some simlar message.

The problem happened to me again last week and it prompted me to change the SD card to rule out that as the cause. In the process of doing so I lost a few photos I had taken that morning. Not a big deal really though this problem did result in the loss of some photos and videos I took of the kids on the first day of the Ashes series at Trent Bridge so it was something worth sorting out.

Yesterday we had a family day out at Skegness and last night I noted that the pics I had taken had been automatically uploaded to Google+. Cool. I went on Google+ to share the photos with the wider family. To my very pleasant surprise the photos I’d taken the other morning but had lost were on Google+.

That’s what I call a result. The loaf of bread, if you’re wondering, is one of the lost photos. It was baked by my very talented wife Anne and didn’t last very long at all:).

Note that the instant upload function on Google+ works far better since I got my fast FTTC connection. The upload is the difference. I don’t know whether that photo would have uploaded quickly enough with my old ADSL connection.

Another interesting photographic weekend with the Galaxy S3. I was in Liverpool for a family party, staying at the Crowne Plaza on the Waterfront. Lots of photos – 3.3GB worth – 1,134 files. The hotel had a free option on its wifi, notionally for email & light browsing. I didn’t do any speed testing but when I got home, 150 or so of the pics had already been uploaded to Google+ using the free wifi and instant uploader.

This has to be the way to do it. You find your pics automatically backed up without thinking, as long as you chose the “wifi only” setting on the phone. The rest of the pics were taken off the phone before they had a chance to upload – I’ll have to adjust my “transfer policy” to give them time to upload.

The inset photo is of me and me dear old Mam on Friday night at a private Davies dinner in the hotel. The header photo is the view from the private room at the SoHo House club on Greek Street in London Town. I was there for a Dell Vantage Club event where the topic of conversation was BYOD. I have to say I am becoming increasingly impressed with these Dell events. Dell is restricting the Vantage Club to 350 CIO/CTO types and it is a great forum for networking with others in the industry. I even bumped into a Timico customer there – great stuff.

PS I’m going to also have to start a policy of filtering the photos I keep on the laptop and offloading the rest to an external hard drive where they will provably never again see the light of day.