Microsoft Releases 'Photos Companion' iOS App for Quickly Transferring Photos to PC

[78Bandit]

Apple already has a perfectly good and free solution in My Photo Stream (not the premium iCloud Photo Library service). Just take a photo on your iPhone and it's there on your PC within a couple second. I believe you need to install iCloud plugin on your PC to get this to work on Windows. With a Mac, it's an automatic process if you use the same iCloud account on both devices.

But what about the examples in the article regarding a public or shared computer. I certainly don't want to install the iCloud plug-in attached to my Apple account on a school or friend's computer just to transfer a photo. This is designed to get photos from any iPhone to any Windows PC without having to worry about going through potentially private accounts like OneDrive, DropBox, or iCloud.

The big limitation I see is a lot of systems utilize a different IP addressing scheme between Ethernet and Wi-Fi which would likely result in a failure to link up. Not a big issue when dealing with laptops, but in a school setting most computers are still hardwired.

Easiest solution is to hook the phone up using a USB cable, hit the button to allow the computer to access the phone, and browse to the photos folder. However, I also understand most people aren't carrying around a lightning cable with them. This wi-fi solution is better than nothing.

 

[Juiceboy]

Does this work for large Video files?
The USB 2.0 Transfer speed is extremely painful for a lot of shooting and editing work i do. It often crashes and goes wrong when trying to transfer multiple files to different PC.s

 

[extrachrispy]

I am helping a senior citizen move from a Windows 10 laptop to an iPad Pro because the laptop is too heavy and his android phone is a nightmare.
I was wondering what was the best way to transfer photos either way. I thought of using Dropbox cloud app but they will already have a 200GB iCloud account for backups. Didn't want to install iTunes bloat just for photos. Now this appears, might be the best solution without having to install iTunes.

There is an iOS Dropbox app. You could shovel the images into Dropbox on the PC, retrieve them from Dropbox on the iPad, and import them into Photos.
[doublepost=1518812352][/doublepost]

Living in hope that one day there will be an easy way to transfer photos out of multiple iCloud accounts onto my Mac Mini.

My Mini is my main photo store. Getting pictures from both my wife and my phones (different iCloud accounts) onto it is just painstaking and horrid.

If you and your wife both have accounts on the Mini, and are both signed into your iCloud accounts on that Mini, and are both logged into the Mini, then your iCloud photos should automatically sync to the Mini in your separate user directories.

What you do from there depends upon what you want: if you want a single, merged collection in one instance of Photos, a little bit of command-line hackery will get you there:

mkdir ~/Downloads/wife_photos
sudo rsync -avH --progress ~wifes_account_name/Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary/Masters/* \
~/Downloads/wife_photos/

Now you can open your instance of Photos and slurp in everything that's new since the last time you did it. It's not automatic and ideal, but it should get the job done (though you will not have any metadata other than the EXIF data in the images themselves). This method will also preserve the dates on the images.

 

[NeilHD]

If you and your wife both have accounts on the Mini, and are both signed into your iCloud accounts on that Mini, and are both logged into the Mini, then your iCloud photos should automatically sync to the Mini in your separate user directories.

What you do from there depends upon what you want: if you want a single, merged collection in one instance of Photos, a little bit of command-line hackery will get you there:

mkdir ~/Downloads/wife_photos
sudo rsync -avH --progress ~wifes_account_name/Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary/Masters/* \
~/Downloads/wife_photos/

Now you can open your instance of Photos and slurp in everything that's new since the last time you did it. It's not automatic and ideal, but it should get the job done (though you will not have any metadata other than the EXIF data in the images themselves). This method will also preserve the dates on the images.

We don't both have accounts on the Mini - it's just mine.

That said, your solution is a reasonable one and the only one I've come across that actually has a chance of working without too much bother, so thanks very much for taking the time to post it!

As a further complication I don't use Photos - I'm still using Picasa. I tried using "old" Photos but it just choked on the amount we had in there and haven't tried the new one yet for fear of being tied into it forever. I like that Picasa just uses the filesystem and directory structure I've already got (and have had for over 15 years). I don't like the thought of it all disappearing into the Photos app never to be seen again in raw form.

I may be totally misguided on the above - I've never really looked into it.

 

[soccerjoshj07]

There is an iOS Dropbox app. You could shovel the images into Dropbox on the PC, retrieve them from Dropbox on the iPad, and import them into Photos.
[doublepost=1518812352][/doublepost]

If you and your wife both have accounts on the Mini, and are both signed into your iCloud accounts on that Mini, and are both logged into the Mini, then your iCloud photos should automatically sync to the Mini in your separate user directories.

What you do from there depends upon what you want: if you want a single, merged collection in one instance of Photos, a little bit of command-line hackery will get you there:

mkdir ~/Downloads/wife_photos
sudo rsync -avH --progress ~wifes_account_name/Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary/Masters/* \
~/Downloads/wife_photos/

Now you can open your instance of Photos and slurp in everything that's new since the last time you did it. It's not automatic and ideal, but it should get the job done (though you will not have any metadata other than the EXIF data in the images themselves). This method will also preserve the dates on the images.

Helpful post. How do you mass import photos from the dropbox app to your camera roll though?

 

[extrachrispy]

Helpful post. How do you mass import photos from the dropbox app to your camera roll though?

Open Dropbox, browse to the photos. Select them. Share them, and from the share sheet, choose "Save Images".