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Comment by rosndo | Hacker News Reader

Have they improved that? Last I tried with 200GB or so of photos it just froze.

Not as of 2 months ago. It took days of crashing or hanging programs to get the photos off my wife's iPhone. I tried everything mentioned including Image Capture on a new MacBook, and the problems were at least as bad for me. I had to change the sleep settings on every device involved to multiple hours because a 30 minute hang was on the good side. In the end, what ended up working best was a full backup of the phone to a PC with iTunes, and extracting the photos out of the backup with iMazing.

For perspective.. I remember downloading and installing Linux off floppies. That sucked too, especially with bad disks or download errors, but it was less frustrating than this.

It seems like they don't improve it because iCloud seems like it works smoothly, and they get an on-going profit stream out of it. The process was so brutal I almost broke down and paid for a ton of iCloud storage.. but didn't because getting lots of photos out of iCloud is also painful.

Were you not about to use the import function in Mac OS Photos app? If you connect a phone via cable, it should present a list of photos and let you import them to the Photos local library.

Most people aren’t importing 200GB of photos from their iPhone in one go…

But some people are.

Hardly seems like an unusual situation. I suspect most people never import photos from their iPhone, they might have quite a few if/when they eventually choose to do so.

Given that Apple are selling iPhones with 1TB of storage these days, you'd expect them to test the ability to import huge libraries. (even if the 13 Pro still uses USB 2.0 so the transfer speeds would be abysmal)

My iPhone 7 supports sync over WiFi. I've never benchmarked it, but I'd expect the speed to be better than USB 2.

Only if you want to use iCloud, no? Or maybe I just wasn’t able to use that at the time because I was on hotel WiFi.

Are new iPhones really doing usb 2 over usb-c?

I don't think it was using iCloud. It would show up in iTunes (haven't used my Mac much since iTunes got split up) and I could drag files around from some applications and back it up to my local drive (in addition to the iCloud backups).

To be clear, 200GB is not a lot. That’s $2 of HDD space (diskprices.com). Or ~400min of compressed video. Or 33 minutes of raw video.

I expect most people import 100G if they have the cheapest model (128G flash), but the rest are importing 200G or more.

If you started on iOS in 2010 and kept all your photos, this is hardly an edge case. People take a crazy amount of photos nowadays, definitely not unique to photographers.

I think the majority of people don’t copy photos from their iPhone to their laptop at all.

Firstly, they may not have a laptop. Secondly, I expect many more of those who have one will sync photos from their phone to iCloud and from iCloud to their laptop then directly from their phone to their laptop.

Yes, for large archives, that costs money ($10 a month gets you 2TB if iCloud storage), but I guess/think the convenience and having almost direct backups in case you lose your phone are worth it for most people who want to do such copying.

If so, it _is_ an edge case.

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