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Comment by tfandango | Hacker News Reader

I hope ability to get photos off iPhones is improved. I can NEVER get it to fully work for more than a few pictures. I know we are supposed to sync them to the cloud now but it's nice to be able to put them on the big drive on the PC sometimes too.

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I've been using ifuse on Linux for years.

https://github.com/libimobiledevice/ifuse

I type "ifuse /mnt/iphone" and there is a DCIM/###APPLE dir with the images and videos where I use "cp -a" to copy the files to my computer

I do have a linux machine again now, I may try this next time.

On Windows you can just open the File Explorer and access the iOS photos

Yes, but it’s extremely unstable. You’ll never copy all photos in one go.

yea, that is exactly my problem

Never tried it but wsl2 might work. Works very well for ext2/3/4 partitions and then you point explorer to \\wsl$\… and it just works.

I’ve noticed this and it seems like the biggest factor is the transfer setting in Photos. I have constant issues (e.g. file copy stops after a few files, can’t see all files in the folder, or phone just disconnects) if (under Transfer to Mac or PC) it’s set to automatic, but when changing it to keep originals, the files copy without any problems. I assume the automatic setting makes the iPhone try to convert between HEIC and JPG.

If you want a certain format for the images, just set the camera to use that format, or convert it yourself after copying off the phone.

Thanks for the tip. It seems I have it set to "keep originals", if I recall this is one thing I changed when having this issue. It has been some time though since I last tried it (because I hate it so much). I'll give it another go sometime soon.

It's only available on macOS, but I've been using the built in "Image Capture" app to do this. It's the only thing I've found that correctly handles all the photos and dumps them in a sensible way.

My process is:

* Connect iPhone to MacBook or similar

* Use Image Capture to dump all photos to a local directory in $HOME

* rsync the directory to my NAS

* Run a wrapper script around ExifTool [0] to sort the photos into folders

[0] https://exiftool.org/

Hmm, I have never had a problem dragging and dropping them off my iPhone via the device that shows up in the My Computer screen when I plug my phone in via USB.

I have done it this way since forever.

Sounds like you are doing a few photos at a time? My library count is now over 200k photos. It worries me that it is almost impossible to get a guaranteed backup of them from iCloud to local storage. Even when I tick the box in Mac photos app to store originals, from my own testing I’ve found lots of images are still only locally loaded when first viewed. Not great for making local backups!

Typically several hundred to 1-2K at most I guess. A mixture of regular, raw, and videos.

Everything has always transferred off just fine at least for me.

For a huge library like that I would go with a reliable software like iMazing.

I downloaded my iCloud library from privacy.apple.com, you can request a copy of your data there. It will take a few days before they send you a link that expires in a week but you'll get your whole library in 50GB zipped chunks.

I have tried it both this way and via some tool like import via MS Photos and earlier Picasa. It works for a while but after a few hundred photos, just seems to die. I've had this problem on every PC I own, with all iPhones I own, using a ton of different USB wires and ports. And it seems to degrade over time somehow, the first attempt I might get 200 photos moved, then the next time I get 20. Stuff like that. I assume it was related to the driver because when it stops working, the phone disappears from the file explorer. Of course, it could totally be me somehow, but I've tried everything I know to eliminate user error.

SimpleTransfer works well, though I have mine automatically sync to my Synology NAS using their Photos program.

It's painful but I use Dropbox for precisely this use case. That reminds me, need to do another update!

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