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How do I get photos off my Apple iPhone?

I just upgraded my G5 mac to the latest Leopard software and am leery about syncing my iPhone with my computer because I'm afraid I'll lose data. However, I really need to get the photos off the phone and don't want to email them to myself, one by one. Your suggestion?

Dave's Answer:

I'm really glad you're running Leopard, aka Mac OS X 10.5, actually, because there's one simple change that Apple's made to the way the phone interacts with the Mac that's a huge boon for those of us that actually take pics with the iPhone!

Plug in your phone, and even if you don't want to sync it with your iTunes software you'll find that if there are photos on the phone that Image Capture can now see 'em and grab them for you:

Mac OS X: Leopard: Image Capture lets you get photos off your iPhone

What I've done is set up a new 'iPhone Pictures" folder in my Pictures directory (instead of the default "Pictures, Movies and Music folders", choose "Other..." then navigate to your Pictures directory and click "New Folder" on the lower left).

Click on "Download All" and you've just accomplished the world's easiest cellphone photo sync on your new Macintosh!

If you are running an earlier version of Mac OS X, then I suggest that you let iPhoto do the work: start that up before you plug in your phone and it should see the phone and offer you the opportunity to download your pictures into an iPhoto "roll".

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Categorized: Cell Phones and Mobile Phones , Mac OS X Help (Article 7664)
Tagged: apple iphone, leopard, mac os x, photography
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Comments

You can use iPhoto to get the pictures off the phone.

I understand where your fear is coming from. If you do a restore on the phone, you will lose any pictures you haven't imported yet. It should really warn you about that specifically because most people don't consider that they have any valuable data on an iPod that didn't come from their computer, so it is always "safe" to do the restore. This changes with the iPhone because of the camera. (It also changes a little bit with games on the 5G iPod because there is the potential to lose your high score data, but most people care about their photos a lot more than their high score from a game.)

Posted by: Brant Sears at November 5, 2007 3:00 PM

How getting the photos off my iphone for WindowsXP or Vista?

Posted by: Gregg at November 5, 2007 3:10 PM

I discovered the answer to the above question. When you plug the iPhone into a Windows computer, it will show up in Windows Explorer as a disk drive. The only documents that will show up in Windows Explorer within the iPhone will be the "Camera Roll" photos that were taken with the iPhone. You can just drag them into a folder on the computer.

Posted by: Gregg at November 8, 2007 9:21 AM

Hello is there way i can get the pictures from the iphone to the computer , not the ones in camera roll??

Posted by: OMar at November 14, 2007 10:11 AM

could someone please post an answer to the question above me, how can we get the photos off the iphone that are not in the camera roll(for instance a bunch of iphoto albums that are on the iphone but got deleted from the computer) please, thanks

Posted by: hunter at December 29, 2007 11:39 AM

I too want to know how to get my pictures that aren't in the camera roll back on my PC. I have 600mb of pics on my iphone that got lost on my Pc and I want them back without having to email them one by one...

Posted by: Lance at January 29, 2008 6:28 AM

Hi Dave,

thanks for all the useful stuff on your site... I've googled problems several times and found answers on your pages. V helpful.

I'm just dropping you a line to be a smart arse... you've got header-paper.jpg (your banner image) displaying 70 pixels wider than the image should be... is that on purpose for the jaggy text styling?

Cheers
Bill

Posted by: Bill Unsworth at January 29, 2008 11:55 AM

Thank you Dave!
I found you site very simple, usable and usefull.

This aswer was so "obvious" that I really can't find the solution by myself but you gave me the right answer!

Thank you and congrats for your cool site! :-)

Posted by: cris01 at March 14, 2008 2:57 PM

I'm also wondering how to get non-iphone-taken pictures off of my iphone. My hard-drive crashed and I lost all of my pictures. Fortunately, some were backed up on my iphone, but I want to get them off of there and on to my new computer -- any way to do it???

Posted by: Lisa at April 30, 2008 11:03 PM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!