Your SIM card is one of the most important parts of your phone, but many of us don’t know exactly what they do. We know that they’re used to enable our phone to make calls and texts to other people, but the average person doesn’t know much more than this.
One common question asked is whether sim cards can hold your photos. We’re going to take a look at whether this is the case or not.
Can a SIM card hold pictures?
The answer is that no, your SIM card doesn’t store the photos that you can on your Android or iPhone.
Some individuals are still confused about how a SIM card actually works, as well as how much information can be retrieved from it.
This is likely due to getting confused between a SIM card and an SD card, which sound similar but are actually different things.
It could also be due to the fact that much older phones may have some older phones have photos stored on SIM cards – but we’re talking a long time ago there.
GSM phones used to have photos and other memory stored within the SIM card of the phone, so this could also be where some people get confused.
Nowadays, photos are stored in the hard memory of your phone, along with pretty much everything else like your messages, calls, videos and other data.
You’ll now find contacts typically saved on phone memory too, though that also used to be saved to SIM cards – confusing, I know. You can still save contacts to SIM when you want to export them to another device quickly.
So, what is the purpose of a SIM card?
SIM Cards are the small chip cards that you’ll find stored in the back of your phone – they are identification modules, and are commonly used for smartphones worldwide.
They hold all of your subscriber information, and they are used as a method of identification by your cellular data provider.
SIM cards can store things – they store your data, which allows you to make calls, send text messages and access the internet from your mobile phone.
Without a SIM card, you won’t be able to make phone calls via mobile data, or send a text message to your friend.
Much of the confusion with SIM cards comes from a slow transfer into a more internet-centric way of calling each other. This includes apps like WhatsApp, that make it really easy to call and send texts via the internet – not using your mobile carrier.
However you still need internet access if you’re not connected to Wi-Fi, and for now a SIM card is the best way to do that. Will that be the case in the future? We’ll see.
Will I lose my photos if I change my SIM card?
If you’ve bought a new phone and want to tranfser all of your photos over, simply changing the SIM card will not be enough.
Photos are stored on the device itself, but they may also be stored on the memory card on the smartphone.
This means that you make the transfer, you’ll have to do this manually – the process is usually quite straightforward to transfer between Android phones or iPhone devices.
Conclusion
Whether you’ve just discovered what a SIM card is or you’ve got a SIM card confused with an SD card, the facts are that SIM cards can contain phone information that’s unique to you – they don’t store your photos.
SIM cards also contain a unique identification number and a PIN that protect against theft or loss. The IMEI identifiers can be used to identify the owner of the SIM card so they can make calls to other people.
