thedonhimself

Q: Transfer photos from iPhone directly to an external HD?

HEllo guys,

 

question for the experts on here...2 years back made the huge mistake of buying the macbook air with flash storage, and in one iphone backup and some itunes music the hd was almost full to the brim. now i cant even make a back up of my phone through itunes because of lack of storage. Last night i managed to back up my iphone directly to my externalHD with some help from these forums... after that( and deleting The old back ups off my computer to try and save space) i tried to import all of my photos from my iphone into iphoto (10,000+ photos) with the hope that once they were on my computer, i would be able to back them up onto my external Hd. However when i tried importing them to my computer i kept getting an "error could not import photo" a quarter of the way through. I also tried to import it to my external hd by holding option when i booted the iphoto app, and creating a new library linked to my external hd, but got the same error right around the same time it was importing. My question is, is there any way to just directly import the files from the iphone onto my external HD without having to use iphoto??

iPhone 6, iOS 8.1.2

Posted on May 18, 2016 7:09 AM

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Q: Transfer photos from iPhone directly to an external HD?

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  • by judysings,

    judysings judysings May 19, 2016 2:09 PM in response to thedonhimself
    Community Specialists
    May 19, 2016 2:09 PM in response to thedonhimself

    Hi thedonhimself,

    I understand you would like to import the photos from your iPhone directly to a folder on your external hard drive.  Are the 10,000+ photos stored on your device, or are you using iCloud Photo Library?

    It sounds like the easiest option would be to update your iPhoto library to be managed by Photos and use iCloud Photo Library to store all of your photos.   

    Updating from iPhoto to Photos for OS X

     

    You can import photos that reside on your iPhone's camera roll directly to an external hard drive using Image Capture.

    Import photos and videos from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

    If you can‘t import photos from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to your computer

     

    Take care,

  • by thedonhimself,

    thedonhimself thedonhimself May 19, 2016 10:29 PM in response to judysings
    Level 1 (8 points)
    Notebooks
    May 19, 2016 10:29 PM in response to judysings

    you have been extremely helpful, i have successfully used image capture to back up my photos to external hD, however i still want to try and do a double back up by importing from my device into an iphoto library onto my external HD. however every time i try and import, the first few thousand photos work fine but then i get a "error importing image" notification, and the entire process stops and no photos get imported...any way to fix this? also to be noted when i used image capture at the end of the importing process i got a notification saying 10 of my items could not be imported.

  • by joe_7399,

    joe_7399 joe_7399 May 23, 2016 2:11 PM in response to thedonhimself
    Community Specialists
    May 23, 2016 2:11 PM in response to thedonhimself

    Hi thedonhimself,

    Thanks for the update.  I'm happy you were able to get your images backed up via Image Capture.  Did you make a note of which 10 images were not able to be imported?  Perhaps you can find them from another source (Photo Stream, Time Machine backup, etc.).  Did you pull these images into one folder on your external drive, or are they at the root level?  Are you using the latest version of iPhoto (version 9.6.1)?  

    I totally agree with you - a backup to the backup is a good plan!  What I would suggest at this point is to use a different external drive, formatted for OS X Extended Journaled with enough space to hold your photos.  Then, create a new iPhoto Library, and import the images from the folder you created on the external drive when you used Image Capture rather than importing directly from the iPhone.

    Give it a try and let me know how you make out.