Most backup advice assumes you want everything. For a lot of people that is the wrong default. If your library is twenty thousand photos and the ones you would genuinely miss number in the hundreds, a full backup means paying to store nineteen thousand six hundred photos you will never open in order to protect the rest.
Backing up selectively is a reasonable thing to want. It is also unreasonably difficult, for a reason worth understanding before you pick a method.
Why this is harder than it should be
When you star a photo, the star is not written into the photo. It is recorded in a database Android maintains called MediaStore, in a field that flips from 0 to 1. Your image file does not change at all.
Backup tools work on files. They have no reason to read that database and no field to put the value in, so every method below has to bridge that gap somehow. The methods differ mainly in who does the bridging: you, or software.
Method 1: Select and upload by hand
The method everyone starts with. Open Gallery, open Favorites, select all, share to Google Drive or Dropbox.
- Works today, on any phone, with no extra software.
- Selection caps bite quickly. Many share sheets stall or fail well before a thousand items.
- It is not incremental. Next month you either redo the whole thing or manually track what is new.
- The star itself is still not preserved. You get the right files in a folder, with no record of why those files.
Realistically this works once. Almost nobody performs it a second time, which means the backup silently goes stale from the day it is made.
Method 2: Move favorites into a real album, then sync that folder
A genuine improvement. Create an actual folder on the device, copy your favorites into it, then point a folder-sync tool such as Autosync or FolderSync at that one directory. From then on, anything you add to the folder uploads automatically.
- Genuinely incremental once it is set up.
- Works with most cloud providers.
- Doubles the storage used on the phone, because the favorites now exist twice.
- Filing is now a manual habit. Star a photo and it does nothing until you remember to also copy it across.
This is the best purely manual approach, and it fails in a predictable way. It depends on you performing a filing step forever, and the failure is invisible: everything looks fine right up until you check and find the last six months missing.
Method 3: Rate photos on a computer instead
Skip the phone entirely. Import to a desktop tool such as digiKam, XnView, or Adobe Lightroom, apply star ratings there, and back up from the computer.
The significant advantage is that desktop tools write ratings using XMP, which embeds the rating inside the image file. That rating travels with the photo permanently and is readable by any other tool, which is the one thing none of the phone-based methods achieve.
- The rating becomes part of the file and cannot be lost to a reset or a new phone.
- Requires a computer and a regular import habit.
- Any starring you already did on the phone is not carried over, so you begin again from zero.
Method 4: Software that reads the flag directly
An app with media permissions can query the MediaStore favorites field itself. That removes the filing step, because the app already knows which photos you starred, and it knows the moment you star another one.
This is the approach Favorites Gallery takes. It reads the same flag your Gallery app reads, copies only those files, and for JPEG photos writes an XMP five-star rating and a Favorite label into each copy before it is uploaded. That last part matters: it combines what method 4 is good at, which is knowing what to back up, with what method 3 is good at, which is making the choice permanent.
Originals are never modified. The rating goes into the copy, and the photo in your camera roll stays exactly as the camera wrote it.
Side by side
| Method | Automatic | Rating survives | Ongoing effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manual selection and share | No | No | High, and never sustained |
| Folder plus sync tool | Partly | No | A filing step, forever |
| Desktop rating and backup | No | Yes | Regular imports |
| App reading the flag | Yes | Yes, for JPEG | None after setup |
Whichever you choose, verify it
An unverified backup is a belief, not a backup. Once yours is running, do this once:
- Open the destination on a different device, not on the phone that made the backup.
- Count the files and compare against the number of favorites you expect.
- Open a few of the largest ones and confirm they are complete rather than truncated.
- Star one new photo, wait for the sync, and confirm that specific file arrives.
That last check is the one that catches real failures, because it tests the thing that has to keep working rather than the thing that worked once on setup day.