Your Picture Keeper is the bridge between the two devices. It carries your files on the drive itself rather than through an online account, so moving photos, videos and documents from a computer to a phone or tablet happens in two passes. First you put the files onto the drive from the computer. Then you unplug the drive, connect it to the phone or tablet, and restore them across from there.
Step 1: Put the files onto the drive
- Connect your Picture Keeper to your computer.
- Open the Picture Keeper computer app.
- On the Home screen, use the Photos, Videos, Docs and Music toggles to choose what to include, then click Start Backup.
- Leave the drive connected until the backup finishes.
Start Backup works by type rather than by individual file: it gathers everything of the kinds you have switched on from this computer.
Putting a particular file or folder on the drive
For one particular folder, or a handful of files a backup would not pick up, copy them onto the drive yourself: open the drive in Finder on a Mac or File Explorer on Windows, and drag them in.
One rule matters here. Whatever you copy has to go inside the drive's top-level Backups folder, or the app cannot see it. Inside Backups the contents are arranged by device, so you will find folders such as iPhone, iPad and one for your computer. Drop your files into whichever of those suits you, or into Backups itself; anything placed there does show up in the restore list in the mobile app.
Anything left outside Backups is invisible to the app and cannot be restored, although it still takes up room on the drive and still counts towards the total shown in Overview.
To check that everything arrived, click Files on PK Drive in the left-hand menu: you select items with the checkboxes, and the two buttons at the top right switch between grid view, which Picture Keeper opens in, and list view.
Step 2: Copy the files onto your phone or tablet
Safely eject the Picture Keeper from your computer and connect it to your phone or tablet. Open the Picture Keeper app, tap Settings, then Restore Files. Your backups are listed by the device they came from, so open the folder named after your computer, tick the items you want and tap Start Restore. On Android the restored files appear in your Gallery app.
The full steps, with screenshots, are here:
Restoring copies your files rather than moving them, so everything stays on the drive as well.
If the drive cannot connect to your phone or tablet
Not every drive and phone can be plugged together. A Picture Keeper Pro SSD can usually connect straight to a phone or tablet that connects by USB-C, but if your device will not take the drive, or the drive is not detected once it is connected, there is no way to copy files from the drive onto that device. Manual Backup Mode is the usual answer for a drive that will not plug into a phone, but it runs in one direction only: it carries files from the phone to your Picture Keeper account, and the computer app then writes them onto the drive. Nothing travels back the other way, so Step 2 needs the drive and the mobile device to connect to each other. Why does Picture Keeper Pro need to use my computer to backup my phone? goes into the two modes in more detail.
If you are having trouble getting your files onto your phone or tablet, contact us and we will be happy to help.