One thing I regret about my early days here in Xinjiang was that I did not bring a camera. One reason for this is that I sold it to buy the one-way plane ticket! But another reason was that a foreigner walking around taking pictures would draw unwanted attention.

Well, that attention concern has never abated. But at least cell phones have cameras – so everyone is taking pictures! It is funny sometimes how people go about it here towards us. On one hand you have the bold impersonal approach – the person walks right up to us, sticks their phone in our faces and snaps a shot, then walks away. No greetings, no thank you’s. Another approach is the shy but stealthy approach – the person comes to us from the side, walking sideways, and with their phone tucked in their arm they sneak a picture. Then there are the friendly types who actually smile, say Ni Hao or hello, or здравствуйте, and make small talk, AND THEN ask for a picture. To those we most often acquiesce.

But what do we use to back up all our photos and videos? Let me share a number of free and paid-for services.

We use Flickr, and so use the Flickr app to backup photos, when on wifi, to our account. For this we paid for the Pro account which gets us 1TB. We also use Amazon Prime and their associated Unlimited Prime Photos backup. Then, just to be sure, we use Shoebox which has a nice feature of showing us weekly what we were doing 1, 2, 5, and 10+ years ago. Its a nice way to go down memory lane. Since I have a Google Nexus phone my pics also are automatically backed up to Google Photos too, once again only on wifi and when the VPNs are on. So that is at least FOUR methods on the cellphones alone. We also move the photos to our computers and external hard drives, which in turn get backed up online! We don’t want to take any chance.

When we want to print them out from here we so far have used Mixbook the most often, although some of the other services look like they have good deals from time to time.