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?
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:
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”.
Dave,
how do i get the photos off my i phone 8 using image capture. I have done it for a long time, but suddenly when I plug my phone into my mac book pro and click on the i phone icon it says there are no pictures, but I can see them in my camera on my i phone? what do I do?
[…] How do I get photos off my Apple iPhone? – Ask Dave Taylor – Hi please help me I have lost all photos of my daughter when she was a baby and need help. I had an iPhone 4 and copied all photos from my windows vista laptop to th … […]
[…] How do I get photos off my Apple iPhone? – Ask Dave Taylor – 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 … […]
I can’t download my pictures to my computer. I have never had problem before but when I plug my iPhone 6 plus into my computer the box doesn’t come up download pictures. What am I doing wrong? Please help…………
I am having this issue. Do you know how to fix it?
Dave, thank you for the help. Just by reading through the posts, I was able to solve my problem with my photos on my phone. You are the best and if I was planning on having anymore children, I’d name them after you! 😉 Thanks again so much and HAPPY NEW YEAR.
Thanks, Dave! Image Capture didn’t recognize my iPhone at first. Then I disconnected it and tried again, with the program open, and it worked like a charm!
Download the dropbox app on your phone and then get on your computer and go to dropbox.com. You can the upload all your photos from your iPhone to your virtual space on the dropbox server.
Just got iphone 5 and can’t sync w/ macbook pro ‘driving’ 10.4.11. Don’t want to upgrade past 10.5.2 or lose photoshop elements 6, toast light, and microsoft office suite as was told versions I have.
Found Phoneview by ecamm.com but that needs 10.5.8.
Do you have any ideas on how to synch contacts/calendar/photos/etc that would work with older software so as not to have to go and spend big $$$ on software?
Hi Dave,
Can you tell me how to import photos (from my iphone to my macbook pro) that someone else has texted me? I’m fine with importing the photos I take with my camera, but I can’t figure out how to import images that friends have texted. Thanks in advance for your help!
not able to view my contacts from the phone in my lab top. which software should i download
Sian, boy, I hate to hear that sort of story. Here’s what I would do: *stop using your PC* and make an appointment at the Apple Store for iCloud. Then take in your phone and your laptop and explain exactly what happened. They have ways of accessing prior iTunes backups and might well be able to recover your photos. Good luck!!
Hi please help me I have lost all photos of my daughter when she was a baby and need help. I had an iPhone 4 and copied all photos from my windows vista laptop to th iPhone 4, no problem. I regularly backed up the iPhone to iCloud and my laptop. I then upgraded to an iPhone 5, since “restoring from iCloud” all music etc has transferred and I plugged the new phone into my laptop and sync’d and backed it up. Then I realised only some of my camera roll is showing and only 85 out of approximately 2400 photos are in photo stream all other albums have gone. I looked on my laptop to copy the photos over and they’ve gone from there too. I have no idea where they have gone. I back up my laptop also as it has this function but I don’t know what to do to try to restore. I am distraught at losing all the photos. Please help????
my girlfriend iphone can’t send me a picture once she saves it to her camera roll. if she doesn’t save it and sends i get the picture. We both have iphones. She and I can send to everybody else.
i have tried image capture but the photos i want to delete are not on the camera roll and are on an album that will not let me delete from the phone. I have tried using a PC and opening the drive and this album doesn’t show as well as iphoto and image capture on my mac and restoring the phone. This keeps coming back. These are not in my photo stream or the cloud. The trash can is not available and i even tried cropping the photos to make them unrecognizable but it just puts the edited pics in camera roll and leaves the original in this album. THe only options i have on the phone for this album under edit are share and add to. Once again, either of these keeps the original no matter what.
Sally, standard approach is to bury the phone in a bag of uncooked rice and give it 24hrs for the rice to pull the moisture out. Good luck!
hi my i phone 4 has been through the washing machine, i have some really improtant txts on it for a court case next week, it was backed up in i tunes but will that have my texts and how can i get them, i have an i pad can i transfer to that…Please HELLLPP
I need help please lol if you can ……. Basically I had my iPhone fixed so that I could keep the pictures and save all my data by a man who downloaded the software to do so fixed my screen and managed to save everything on there “……… It was working all well and good and then after about four weeks one night it just decided to turn its self off but not totally “…….. All that happens is something about software malfunction and and now telling me to plug into iTunes … But when I do plug it in it does absolutely nothing ……. It’s so strange …..
Does anyone know what to do…..????? Or has anyone had this problem themselves ??? Get back to me please !!!
hi whenever i have my iPhone connected (its a regular 4 and my service is att) it doesn’t show up as a device. please help because i have no more room on my iPhone and i need to get these pictures off for more space! thanks so much
Can I take my phone to a store and have prints made off my phone?
I have an Iphone4 and want to delete pictures in the camera roll but savethem in the albums. Itseems like I have to delete them everywhere
I’ve been having trouble syncing my iphone pics to iphoto so I used image capture and deleted the pics off of my phone manually. The only problem is my iphone and itunes are still showiing the memory as being used. How do I recover this memory? Thanks.
this was so helpful thanks!!!W
Very Useful Tip, search for Image Capture through Spotlight and follow Daves instruction.
Thanks so much for your technical advice. I don’t really use sync, cause I don’t like it. I’ve had some trouble downloading images from my iPhone to my PC. You just gave me a great alternative solution, thanks again!
Thank you that was very helpful. I never thought just to open iPhoto on my MacBook Pro.
my iPhone 4S made a new camera roll album by itself after I downloaded some photos through Image Capture, and placed all previous ones in an album with a date on it. Now I can’t get photos from that album from either Preview or Image Capture. Any idea how can I either transfer them to the camera roll album or at least download them? May I add how mind boggled I am to discover that 4 (almost 5) generations into it, all Apple could think of including on the photo manage option in iTunes, is how to bring photos ONTO the phone instead of off it. How can that be? Is that because of some deal they have with makers of a program that does that?
Thanks, Dave, for the super simple solution!
Thank you! You just ended years of backup frustration!
Hi Dave,
Nice tip, thank you so much.
I really hate iTunes sync- it usually deletes everything on the phone.
Maybe I have missed something but I wonder why the left out the choice of which way the sync will go in iTunes? Really frustrating, I think.
Thanks again.
Cheers
Thank u for sharing! This is so awesome and quick and works like a charm 🙂
Thank You!!
Thanks so much for the advice. I was having trouble downloading photos from my iPhone to my PC. The answers given out to other questions also provided a solution for me!
Rachel, sounds like you might have the wrong driver installed on your PC, so something else is seeing the phone when plugged in. Does it pop up a window “new device: default action?” still?
Jordan, sounds like you’re asking me how to find and copy a video from your iPhone onto your computer? If so, Image Copy can do that too. Simply click on the “size” column to have everything sorted large-to-small, then click the video images (they’re ‘.MOV’ files, if I remember correctly), specify where you want them copied in the pop-up on the bottom, and click “Copy Selected…”
i have a video on my phone of horses jumping how can i get pictures of them jumping of the video
HELP! I’m trying to download the photos on my iPhone 3GS to My Dell running XP. I’ve looked through the questions and responses here and can’t find a solution to my situation, which is that although I have the iPhone plugged in to the USB port, its not showing up in Windows Explorer. When I plug it in, the computer beeps, and so does the phone. But the only new drive that shows is is Local Disk (V:) which says “Access is Denied”…
Rachel
Thank you so much, your advice helped me a lot, I am kind of lazy in exploring my Mac in the matter of programs unless I need smth. Now I know ImageCapture – so cool and good luck!
Hi there,
I have an issue that I’m not able to find information on for fixing. I had a year’s worth of pictures in my Camera Roll and finally imported everything with Windows Explorer. The pictures that import are removed but there are still about 2/3 a year of pictures on the phone that will not delete after the import is completed (I have checked the box to have them deleted after import.) I have an iPhone 4 and unfortunately use Windows Vista. How do I get these pictures off? Do I have to delete the multiple thousands of pictures one by one off of the phone?
Balaraju, the only way I can imagine that you successfully deleted a core app like the App Store on your iPhone is if you’ve jailbroken the phone and aren’t running the stock iOS. In that case, I’m afraid I can’t help you out and you’re on your own. Good luck.
app store on my iPhone3GS by mistake got deleted. Can you tell me how to restore this from itunes. Also i have a doubt that when syncing with iTunes whether iphone contents will be backed up to PC or what ever is backedup in PC will come back to iPhone. – with regards – Balaraju
Thanks Steve at March 14, 2010 9:13 PM!! I only had to delete ONE offending photo. Then my phone showed up as a camera in Computer on Windows 7. The transfer was easy from there following others suggestions. Thank you so much!!!
Gretchen, hmm, here’s what I suggest: set the check box on the lower left of Image Capture to “delete after download”, then choose the images 25-50 at a time. It might just get cranky about thousands of images, but if you copy and delete 100 at a time, say, you should be able to get them all, though it’s a bit tedious. Good luck!
Hello! I have an iPhone 3G (that I am ready to recycle) but I can’t get ALL of the pictures downloaded to my macbook air. I am using image capture and I have almost 2000 pictures, but when it gets to 368 it stalls and won’t go any further. I have gone thru to make sure all the photos in my camera roll were taken from my iphone and deleted those that were texted to me. Do you have any suggestions? Thank you!
My Iphone 4 says it is in recovery mode and needs to be restored, but I have some recent photos I haven’t transferred to my computer yet – do you know if there is any way of getting them off the phone before I restore the factory settings? I will be heartbroken to lose the photos completely. Will they be on my sim card if I take that out before I restore?
it turns out that about 1500 pics were copied out of about 2000 and ended up in the folder but about 500 were still no were but on iphone3gs
here’s my problem
have an iphone 3gs, it was snyc to my imac os x 10.4.11
then i bought an iphone4..so then had to upgrade imac o/s to mac os x leopard 10.5 (now it’s 10.5.8) but in the process i lost all old iphone data on the imac.. it’s all still on iphone but i want to put back on imac so i can then put onto new iphone 4
been trying to download photos from phone to mac but it keeps freezing near the end (and i have tried deleting pics so there less)i’ve tried through iphoto and just now with image capture and it froze so i canceled it but the photos seem to have end up in the folder i created as per his advice i got from this page(so cheers for that part) i’ve been struggling for 6 days so far (technology is no friend of mine)
Hi, just a quick question. My girlfriend had her iPhone synced to her PC which has now died a death, but she has pics to get off the phone. Are there any issues with getting the pics from the phone onto my computer, which is a Mac?
I know that there are issues with getting songs off an iPod onto Mac, if the iPod is PC based. Is this the same for getting pics off?
To take photos off iPhone 4 to Windows XP, follow:
1: Plug in iPhone
2: Locate iPhone through MyComputer
3: Right click on iPhone
4: Select ‘Get pictures’
5: Follow Wizard and save photos to preferred location.
Lots of playing aroudn but this finally worked for me.
Cheers
Matt
Hey there. I recently had a virus on my PC and had to have it restored, losing all picc, music and vids….they are on my iphone however. How do I get them from iphone back to PC? There are several photo albums and playlists I don’t want to lose. I appreciate your help.
Thx.
Thank you so much! I had no idea image capture was something already on my computer. I was worried how I was going to get all these pictures off effectively. Just got my iPhone and had already gone picture crazy 😛