Technology Rant of the Day

I don’t think I’m technologically illiterate, but there are times I’m ready to give up and go back to the days of the rotary dial telephone and snail mail communication.

Like today, for instance.

My iPhone instructed me that I had a software update to install and, like a good little techno-geek, I pressed the Settings tab to comply. Except that my iPhone got snippy with me and told me I didn’t have enough storage to complete the task.

The last time my iPhone got snippy with me, I took it to the Apple store and traded it in. 

Take that, iPhone 4!

Sure, it was an expensive alternative to actually deleting stuff off my phone, but, hey, I was ready for a new one anyway.

This time, unfortunately, my phone isn’t eligible for an upgrade and I refuse to pay $600 for a new one. So I figured I’d better investigate the source of the clog.

Turns out that the bajillion photos I’ve taken on my iPhone are taking up the lion’s share of the storage. This was not surprising since I had no less than fifty-seven photos of our friends’ twins messily playing with smash cakes on their first birthday a couple months ago. Fifty-seven!

Lots of photos, yeah, but they sure are cute!

And this was only a small portion of the photos I took that day.

You thought I was kidding?!

And why I haven’t deleted the two dozen photos my niece recently took of the inside of her mouth in order to count the number of teeth she has, I do not know.  Perhaps I was thinking I could someday embarrass her with them or something.  Hee hee. Evil Aunt Jane, I know.

Anyway, I spent half the day trying to figure out how to get the photos off the phone and onto the external hard drive I purchased for this very purpose.

And, while I somehow managed to get eight hundred seventy-two photos onto the hard drive, there were many, many more photos than that on my phone. Which doesn’t compute.

Kidding. I don't have a great aunt Myrtle.

In frustration, I tried simply trashing all the photos on the phone.  I figured I’d risk deleting that last photo of great aunt Myrtle celebrating her 100^th birthday because somehow, somewhere I have stuff stored on the “Cloud” and surely that photo must already be saved. Right?

Yeah, right.  I pretend like I know what the Cloud is all about, but in truth, I have no real freaking clue. Like…where do I find stuff that is stored on this mystical Cloud? 

Got me.

I tried Googling instructions on the photo transfer process, but got frustrated and had to step away from the computer, lest I do something drastic and toss the thing out the window.  Instead, I did Saturday chores like watering the plants, washing the darks and scrubbing the toilets. Believe me, I had to be extremely frustrated with my online search to have preferred scrubbing toilets over deciphering Google instructions.

Eventually, I wandered back to the computer and tried again. I read something about how photo albums added using iTunes cannot be deleted from the iPhone unless one accesses iTunes and makes the change there.

Great.  I no longer have iTunes loaded on any computers we own because I exceeded the number of computers I had loaded it on.  And, while I thought I had followed instructions and “unauthorized” old computers that had iTunes on them before recycling the machines, evidently I didn’t.

Sigh.

 

In the end, I manually deleted enough photos to give me adequate storage to allow the Software update.  

It doesn’t make me any more informed about the correct process, but at least I got the job done.

Until the next update, anyway.

And I'm really hoping that by then I’ll be eligible for a phone upgrade and I can tell snippy iPhone 5 where he can stick it when he tells me I don't have enough storage for the update.

Okay, technology rant over. For today.