If you use Instagram, chances are you've already started to see your friends posting collages of their "top nine" photos of the year. The first year I started noticing these I spent a solid half hour at least trying to figure out where to find the collage within Instagram's app. Spoiler: you're not going to find it in there. It has the look and feel of a built-in Instagram feature, but it's not.

As I've written previously, iCloud can be a little confusing. It's not meant to be — at least, I don't think Apple intended it to be — but a number of people seem to get caught up by iCloud's synchronisation setup. While it's wonderfully convenient to have the same photos appear across all of your iCloud-using Apple devices, removing photos on one device removes them everywhere else.

There's more to a travel photographer's kit than a camera body and a few lenses. Here are the essentials the pros always keep close at hand.

Trying to find the perfect iOS apps can be tough, and we’re willing to bet that your iPhone or iPad is full of pages and pages of apps. There’s just so much out there, it’s hard to come up with a short list of favourites. We understand. Allow us to help you with our freshly updated Lifehacker Pack for iOS.

There are so many Windows apps out there, that picking a list of the very best, most must-install software for your desktop or laptop feels daunting. We've pored over pages of recommendations, countless forum posts, and lots of comments to come up with this year's Lifehacker Pack for Windows, a list of software champions across four categories: productivity, internet/communications, music/photos/video and utilities.

Which Android app is worth a spot on your new smartphone or tablet? Trying to find the very best of the best is a challenging process, because there are millions of apps to pick from on the Google Play Store. Even if you just scan Google’s “top free” or “top paid” list on a daily basis, you’ll miss out on a lot of digital gems. Allow us to help you out with our freshly updated Lifehacker Pack for Android.

Windows: I wouldn’t be surprised if you have have folders upon folders of photographs that you swear you’ll get to sorting “someday”. For me, that day was this weekend. For whatever reason, I felt like spending a few hours trying to tackle my lifetime of photographic history that I’ve dumped into a big “To Sort” folder on my network-attached storage device.

Flickr isn’t going away, but a lot of your photos will be if you don’t follow its new limitations: 1,000 photos, period. These photos can be any size you want, but you only get a thousand of them. The era of the free terabyte of Flickr storage is coming to an end.

The subject of file backups and online storage came up the other day at a Lifehacker staff meeting, and resident door-holder Nick Douglas chimed in that his solution for backing up his laptop was easy: He never keeps any important files on it. Everything — and he means everything — lives in the cloud.

Photo bloat is real, people. Most of us forget about all of our selfies, food shots, and random photos shortly after we post them to Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, et al. But your phone doesn't. The files sit in the camera roll in your Photos app, taking up valuable storage space that you could be filling with apps, podcasts, or if you're like me, a giant backlog of email. Eventually, things may get so bad that you're scrolling through Photos and deleting a few pictures every time you need space.

There are way too many third-party phone camera apps. This can make choosing a good one unduly difficult. We recently highlighted a couple of my personal favourites in the iOS and Android Lifehacker Packs, but there are plenty more that people love to use. Here are the best of the bunch, according to our readers.

Dear Lifehacker, Three or four years ago, my Macbook died, and because I was an avid user of Time Machine, I was able to retrieve virtually everything I cared about from my external hard drive, except my photos. Because this tragedy happened to coincide with a software update, the updated photos couldn’t access the old photo library that was stored on the other drive.

I'm a huge fan of night modes. Night/Dark modes are easier on your eyes and your device's battery, and frankly just look better, in my opinion. This week I came across a Chrome extension that adds a dark mode to Instagram on the web. Called "Night Mode for Instagram" the extension transforms your Instagram feed into something a little easier to look at.

When we mentioned last week that you should screenshot your boarding pass and other important travel documents, several readers chimed in with tips on real-world things to photograph as well.

iOS: When it comes to taking pictures outside, there’s definitely something to be said for snapping that shot during the “magic hour”. However, figuring out when that is, especially when you’re travelling, can sometimes be a bit of a challenge.

Google's Photos Assistant is an amazing tool, most of the time. For starters, it's not too obtrusive, offering users a different take on their photos and videos when it thinks it has spotted a special event or image that is worth a little extra effort. But there's also a problem.

The Perseid Meteor shower is expected to peak on August 13, which means it will be prime time to catch a glimpse of a falling star (or 20). Over 75 shooting stars are expected to fly by an hour, which means you should be able to catch that glimpse not only with your eyes but also with your camera.

We're turning the lens around for this week's Ask Lifehacker. Our Managing Editor Virginia Smith posed a question in our internal Slack channel that cuts wide and deep: "It's safe to delete photos from my iPhone, right?"

Windows: Here's an incredibly useful extension that you'll want to grab from the Windows Store if you have any kind of device - cough Apple cough - that shoots and stores .HEIC images.