Other Exporting photos from iPhone, to import them after a factory restore.

[Populus]

I’ll post this here, although this could be posted on macOS forum as well. I’m trying to export the photos from my iPhone 8 (with iOS 12) to a safe place, keeping all of them in the HEIF format (which my Mac and my iPhone are compatible with), and hopefully importing all of them into macOS 11 and iOS 14, which will allow me to tag them with keywords or even descriptions -for an easier search after that, because now it is impossible-.

I have to point two things before you can help me choosing which route to follow: 1) I don’t use iCloud for my photos, and I have iCloud disabled on all my devices, and it will stay that way; anyways I wouldn’t have enough space to store all my pictures there. And 2) I have Live Photos disabled, so no weird formats or videos, just the HEIF image files.

I have a rather large photo library from my iPhone 8, as it is almost 2 years old, and my plan is to perform a factory restore to install iOS 13.6.1 on it, because I’ve been trying it on my iPad and it works flawlessly, and it is pretty good with battery life. But before that, I have to extract, export, save my photos outside my iPhone. So there are two routes:

Route 1: plug my phone, try to reach the photo library, and copy the raw library on my mac (or an external hard drive through my mac)

Route 2: Sync? I’m a bit afraid of syncing my devices because it reminds me of iTunes and it gives me nightmares... Rather, I could try to export the whole library to the Photos App, and then, go to Finder -> Images -> Photos library and copy that file on an external hard drive. If I do this... Probably I will be able to restore this library on Photos App on Big Sur, but I’m not sure how to copy them back into my iPhone.

And there comes, actually, my main struggle: How can I import that photo library again, from the hard drive, or from the Photos App? Is the Photos App capable of syncing (omg that word again) the photo library with my iPhone locally? Remember, I’m not using any cloud service. We could spend two pages arguing why is it better or not, but the fact is that I don’t want my pictures in the cloud, and I don’t have space in the cloud anyways.

If any of you has an easy route to backup only my pictures in HEIF format, and import them again on the iPhone like they were just shot with the iPhone (and not on a separate album named “imported” or something similar), I’m all ears eyes.

Thanks for reading

 

[VineRider]

Some potential options

Transfer photos and videos from your iPhone or iPad to your Mac or PC - Apple Support

Learn how to transfer photos from your iPhone or iPad to a Mac or PC.

support.apple.com

 

[Populus]

Thank you. On that web, the route explained is the one using Photos App. I’m not sure what’s best, syncing the photos with the Photos App, and then extracting the Photos App library (a single file), or extracting the whole raw photos onto a Finder folder, and then copying that folder on my external hard drive.

I‘d like to know whats best to import those photos later on a Big Sur Photos App, and on iOS 14

 

[VineRider]

I’m not an expert on this, but this article seems like a solution

Sync photos between your Mac and iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

On your Mac, sync all or a selection of photos to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

support.apple.com

Airdrop may be another method to get them back on the iOS device

 

[now i see it]

I've never run into problems updating to a newer version of iOS WITHOUT nuking the phone & starting over. 99.9% of the billion active iOS devices currently in use just update the OS in situ and are done with it.
Your fears (botched update) are not warranted.

I once did a clean install (to iOS 13) and it took me days to get everything all organized again. It's such a laborious task. -- I'll never do that again.

 

[Populus]

I've never run into problems updating to a newer version of iOS WITHOUT nuking the phone & starting over. 99.9% of the billion active iOS devices currently in use just update the OS in situ and are done with it.
Your fears (botched update) are not warranted.

I once did a clean install (to iOS 13) and it took me days to get everything all organized again. It's such a laborious task. -- I'll never do that again.

When I jump from an early version of iOS 12 to a late version of iOS 13, or when I jump from Mojave to Catalina (which had a very different volume organization) I prefer to do a backup and then perform a clean install. Sure, I can let the system perform the transformation of volumes and such (like in Catalina’s case) but a clean install ensures everything is working as intended.

Anyways, if I want to jump to a new device, the process to save all my photos would be the same, so the thread is still valid even if you think people should stick to OTA updates.