HACKER Q&A
📣 giantg2

iPhone Issues?


My wife ran out of space on her iPhone (iOS 15, I think) due to pictures. She doesn't want to delete them. I'm trying to transfer them to a PC (Win11).

I connected the Phone to the PC, hit yes on both the trust and transfer picture prompts. After a minute or two the iPhone shows up in the file explorer and I start the copy. However, the copy seems to take forever even for a small folder, and the resulting copy is missing a bunch of files. I also tried importing them into MS Photos, but rhe transfer drops after about 200 item because it says the phone is unreachable.

The phone will not connect to iTunes because it's out of date. It wants to update to iOS16, but of course it can't because it needs something like 6GB free.

I was able to export pictures out of iCloud, but that's only 2GB. Plus, it's nearly impossible to reconcile what was exported with what is sill on the phone. Supposedly it was supposed to delete them from the phone when they were deleted from iCloud. However, it doesn't seem to be happening.

And of course being an iPhone, a copy to an SD card isn't an option.

Really frustrating. So how can I save these pictures?

  👤 k310 Accepted Answer ✓
I have used ImageCapture (standard on a mac), PhotoSync (not free, but it's cross-platform), and the SanDisk iXpand drive. (with its app, plugs into the phone, backs up photos. Unplug it and the other end of it is USB to share with a computer). AirDrop works with macs. (Always have a friend with a mac and v/v)

Apparently, iXpand is very slow if your photos are in iCloud, because it has to download them in order to back them up. Use it with on-phone photos. I recall that it backs up the photos incrementally.

There may be other apps that web-serve the photos. If so, you can use wget or curl to bulk copy them.

👤 Leftium
Google Photos will sync iPhone photos/videos via wifi/data (optionally at original resolution), then delete the photos from the device.

Also I'd look for videos first. They tend to be the largest files and the free space from deleting them (after copying them over) might help.

👤 giantg2
I can't edit, so here's my update. I was able to do the transfer after deleting some apps to free up enough space to update through iTunes on the PC (doesn't take as much space that way). Then I also set the settings to transfer the originals pictures, not doing auto conversion for compatibility. I also reset the location and privacy settings in order to forget the computer and re-trusted it. I still had issues with the phone showing up and staying connected at first. Maybe I just got lucky that it all transfered since I still had some connection issues when trying to delete files bia file explorer.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

👤 runjake
I really like imazing[1]. It's not free, but I believe the trial version will pull photos for you. Runs on Windows/Mac.

1. https://imazing.com/

👤 logicalmonster
I don't specifically know about solving your problem the right way, but a hacky way to approach this might be to delete less important Apps that can be redownloaded, and email photos/videos somewhere (so you don't lose them), and delete them until you free up 6 GB to do the update. Afterwards, once you update and hopefully do the transfer, you can try and manually add those photos back into your phone I think.