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AFPoster

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 14, 2008
1,565
152
Charlotte, NC
All my wife has is an iPad 2 an iPhone 4s and now the iPhone 5. I did not do a restore from backup since she never had that setup when we activated the iPhone 5 so a lot of her pictures are missing. Is there a way that I can transfer all of the photos on the 4S to the 5?
 
All my wife has is an iPad 2 an iPhone 4s and now the iPhone 5. I did not do a restore from backup since she never had that setup when we activated the iPhone 5 so a lot of her pictures are missing. Is there a way that I can transfer all of the photos on the 4S to the 5?

She never had what setup? The only way to get the photos off the 4S without a computer is through the iCloud backup. You're going to have to reset all setting on the 5 and instead of setting up as new, restore from the last backup of the 4S.
 
You can email the photos via wifi from her old iPhone to her herself. She can then pick up the emails on her new iPhone and save them to the Camera Roll. This is easy for groups of pix; there's a limit to how many you can attach each time so it may take a number of emails if there are many pix. I use Gmail for this a lot because I don't use iCloud.
 
Setup a Dropbox account on the 4s and upload all her photos to Dropbox. Then, download and sign into the Dropbox app on the iPhone 5 and all the photos will be in the app and she can save them from there. This is assuming that she doesn't have more than 2GB of pictures and videos...
 
Right. I forgot about Dropbox & I use it, too. You have a number of options available to you, but you really should setup your new iPhone thru iTunes or iCloud so you'll have a reliable backup handy. :)
 
Gah, sounds like a mess of work to do. She already took over 300 photos from this weekend on the i5. I'll see what I can do about creating another photostream on the 4S and sharing, hopefully it wont delete the images on the 5.
 
Fire up Image Capture.app and connect the iPhone. You can then drag all the photos and videos on it into a folder.

Connect the new iPhone; you should be able to drag them back.

This is much faster than trying to email or dropbox the pics. You don't even have to sync the phone to do this; Image capture talks to your phone seperately, as if it's a standalone digital camera.

Good luck!

EDIT: I was wrong; you can't use Image Capture to copy photos back to the phone. :(

Why does she want to have so many photos in the camera roll anyway? The camera roll is sort of like a temporary location for photos you take to go; you're supposed to copy them out of there occasionally. I sync photos back to the phone using Aperture, organized into albums. Much cleaner than having 4000 photos in your camera roll, IMO
 
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Whatever you do, you'd better back up those photos someplace because if there's a glitch, even a temporary one, her pix could be gone. You can plug each iPhone into your computer and read each as a drive. Use a photo wizard (Windows or Mac) to copy the pix from the iPhone to your computer. I did this when preparing to upgrade from my iPhone 4 to present iPhone 5. I named the folder that I created the date of the action. It doesn't matter what you call the file as long as you know what it contains.

Your main concern at this point is to safeguard/preserve the older pix that are located on the older iPhone without endangering the newer pix on the iPhone 5.
 
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