Why is it so hard to transfer photos from iPhone to Mac?

[bzgnyc2]

I know it has always been a painful experience to send photos from iPhone to Mac. Ever since 2007 you connected it, launched Photo Transfer app and hoped for the best.

I wonder how do you transfer photos? What is your go-to method to get footage off the iPhone?

I use Photos on Mac with the iPhone connected directly over USB. Wireless would be nicer in this day and age but I just use the moment to do a backup to my Mac and then get a full charge.

The Photos import step is just a few clicks. I normally just select all/delete after finishing and then complete any organizing in Photos.

By the way, I believe iPhone still offers a DCIM folder though it may hide it on the Mac side. As far as I know that's the one folder that Apple still exposes to computers over USB.

I recall they also used to make the Music folder visible that way but dropped that ability to load music into the iPhone many years ago. I would prefer the option to access the whole phone like it was a filesystem. iMazing gets close to that but I would prefer something more direct...

 

[IJustWannaTalk]

I think it's rare and you can be unlucky. This forum is obviously full of people who know about back ups or interested to learn but the vast majority of everyday people won't realise their data isn't backed up.

This is why iCloud+ can be so useful for everyday people, at least all their pictures will be backed up online and they seldom have to think about such.

 

[Contact_Feanor]

Well, in reality being locked in iCloud, specially if you take a lot of photos, is that in time you will have an enormous number of photos in iCloud you would have for. But what is worst, at least for me, is that the photos in my iPhone's Photos Folder aren't the original full-size photos I have taken with this cellphone, since these "originals" don't reside in my iPhone, but is iCloud.

There's a setting on the iPhone and on the Mac to download full-resolution photos to the device.

 

[AlaskaMoose]

There's a setting on the iPhone and on the Mac to download full-resolution photos to the device.

Yes, one can download the high resolution stored in iCloud, too. I just connect my iPhone to the computer and edit some or all the photos I have taken with it using one of the apps I have in my computer. I could also upload them from the iPhone to Photos, but I prefer to edit them with other apps, and then move some of the images to Photos.

And while I could accomplish all of this above, I have set my Mac's iPhone, and iPad to not sync anything to iCloud. So the photos I have in Photos are full resolution pre-edited images that take a lot of room in the computer, only if I were to keep them in there. Instead of storing them in the computer in Photos, and other folders, I store them externally, leaving behind relatively small images that don't take very much space in the internal drives (explained below).

Now, in my work computer, a Mac Studio, Photos is completely empty. In my McBook's Photos folder I only have images that are under 1MB in size (from 300 or so Kb to 900 or so Kb); these are images that I can email to friends and family. By the way, these images are edited for posting anywhere online and have all the original colors embedded, and each takes a fraction of a second to email, or text, and so on (some examples of these photos are in the Photo Of The Day Forum).

 

[JamesMay82]

Another thing to remember about cloud is that you can’t download full resolution photos from the iCloud website. You can only get access to full resolution if you download to your photos app..

Or you couldn’t at least when I last tried in April.. it would convert raw to JPEG’s

 

[AlaskaMoose]

Another thing to remember about cloud is that you can’t download full resolution photos from the iCloud website. You can only get access to full resolution if you download to your photos app..

Or you couldn’t at least when I last tried in April.. it would convert raw to JPEG’s

Thanks for sharing!

That is very interesting, and if true, it gives me another reason to avoid iCloud, since I was under the impression that I could download any of my RAW or unaltered files to an external SSD connected to a Mac or PC.

To other forum members in this thread: please understand that for me to not use iCloud to upload the files I have mentioned above is a personal choice as it works for me. I clearly understand the iCloud, Syncing, and so on works well for the great majority of people.