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Some pictures and videos are the wrong format when copying from iPhone to PC

K

kidtriton

macrumors newbie
Original poster
In the last year or so I've noticed that when I copy a month's worth of photos from an iPhone to a PC there will be 5-10% of them that are pictures yet have a .MOV extension or a video with a .JPG/.HEIC extension. If you manually rename the file with the correct extension the image or video is fine.

I've also noticed that the entire file names of photos will change from one day to the next. For example I could copy off this past August's worth of pictures and videos today, and then do it again next week and a picture that is IMG_3050 may be IMG_3039 next week.

This is very annoying and I'm worried there's other data corruption or missed images when backing up my family's photos for long term archive storage. I've been manually copying from the family iPhones like this for well over 10 years and it's just been in the past year with iOS 18 I've noticed this happening. It's happening on my 15Pro, wife's 15Pro, and two daughters with 14Pro and 13Pro on all the different iOS releases, we keep the phones up to date.


EDITED TO ADD: It was happening last year with iOS 17, I made a thread about it and no one replied.

 
kidtriton said:
In the last year or so I've noticed that when I copy a month's worth of photos from an iPhone to a PC there will be 5-10% of them that are pictures yet have a .MOV extension or a video with a .JPG/.HEIC extension. If you manually rename the file with the correct extension the image or video is fine.

I've also noticed that the entire file names of photos will change from one day to the next. For example I could copy off this past August's worth of pictures and videos today, and then do it again next week and a picture that is IMG_3050 may be IMG_3039 next week.

This is very annoying and I'm worried there's other data corruption or missed images when backing up my family's photos for long term archive storage. I've been manually copying from the family iPhones like this for well over 10 years and it's just been in the past year with iOS 18 I've noticed this happening. It's happening on my 15Pro, wife's 15Pro, and two daughters with 14Pro and 13Pro on all the different iOS releases, we keep the phones up to date.


EDITED TO ADD: It was happening last year with iOS 17, I made a thread about it and no one replied.

Click to expand...
One option could be to logon to icloud.com and export the pictures straight from "photos" from the website. That's normally what I do when using Windows.

You have the option to choose quality and format when doing it from iCloud.
 
For Live Photos, I upload them to OneDrive. For anything else, I use Send Anywhere to transfer from iPhone to a Windows computer. It can be used on other systems as well, android, macOS, Linux.

Live Photos remain as Live Photos even when downloading from OneDrive back to an iPhone or iPad. I only shoot Live Photos when I was still using iPhone 7 Plus but switched to ProRAW [iPhone 14 Pro Max] and RAW [iPhone 11 Pro Max using ProShot] and the file extension is DNG.

After discovering the Unpro Camera app, I decided to just use HEIC or JPEG when shooting using a smartphone but keep using RAW when shooting using a DSLR camera.

I use IrfanView plus HEVC [free] or HEVC [paid] and HEIC extension. I just download and sideload them since Microsoft Store is not installed on my Windows computer.
 
Last edited:
kitKAC said:
That's how Live Photos work

https://copytrans.studio/support/what-is-live-photo/
Click to expand...
No, I have live photos turned off, if that's on you get a jpg plus a little video. This will be a .MOV file that says it's corrupt, you rename it to .jpg and then it's fine.

Another example of this type of weirdness: I took 5 pictures of my daughter's first day of school a couple weeks ago. 5 pictures all taken in the same minute. Two of them copy to my PC as .PNG and three of them copy as .JPG. Why? All I did was hit the camera shutter button 5 times.

EDIT: Better yet, I just copied the whole 202508_ folder from my phone to PC again as a separate folder and this time all 5 of those pictures I mentioned above came over as .JPG. But there's different pictures now that copied as .PNG and a lot of the file names (IMG_8214 for example) are different between the two folders for the same picture.
 
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Here you go, the column on the right that says Files already in 2025-07 is what I copied to my computer in August, once July was over. This morning I re-copied the 202507_ folder off my phone (left column) and all pictures are different for the same file name. It even has the time and date wrong for pictures that I know exactly when they were taken. Why is the phone renumbering pictures from a previous month? Once that month is over shouldn't it stay the same unless you delete something and then it would just be missing?

example.jpg
 
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