As the saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with youand that'swhy so many of us have smartphones absolutely stocked with memories from nights out on the town to a child's first days in the world. But while taking photos on your smartphone is no problem, getting them offyour phone and onto your PC can sometimes be a pain.

You could just hook your smartphone up to your PC every now and again and just transfer them over a USB cable, but ugh, wires.

A better alternative is to put the mobile apps you already have on your phone to work. Several can send pictures to your PC automatically, and one can even do it without leaning on the cloud whatsoever.

One of the most seamless ways to get photos on your PC is to use Dropbox. The original device sync app can be set to automatically upload photos from your device to Dropbox, and you'll get up to an extra 3GB of free storage space for using the feature, more than doubling the 2GB of free space provided to users.

If you use Dropbox's default settings on your PC then photos will automatically be synced down to your PC.You can also set Dropbox to only upload photos over Wi-Fi so that you don't get hit with an unexpected Internet charge from your carrierbut be sure to prune your photo collection occasionally, as photos can make you hit your Dropbox storage limit all too fast.

To get started open Dropbox on your mobile device and go to Settings > Camera Upload.

The company also has a new photo viewing app called Carousel that automatically uploads photos to Dropbox. With Carousel, Dropbox is also offering an extra 3GB of free storage space for your photos, but only if you haven't previously used up your free photo allotment using camera upload on the regular Dropbox app.

Microsoft's cloud storage solution offers a similar back-up method to Dropbox. Just like Dropbox, you can set OneDrive to only upload photos over Wi-Fi. Also like Dropbox, Microsoft will give you 3GB of free additional storage if you configure the OneDrive mobile app to automatically save photos to the cloud, bolstering the service's 7GB of free storage.

Windows 8 has SkyDrive/OneDrive baked in by default, making the mobile OneDrive app's automatic uploads a dead-simple way to ensure your phone photos wind up on your PC.

Set up OneDrive's camera uploads by going to Settings > Camera backup.

Original post:

5 apps to easily move photos from your phone to your PC