Photos not showing/importing Iphone photos

Greetings Apple community - I'm trying to remove about 1800 pictures off of my phone and import into Photos. However, one of three things happens:

1 - Photos doesn't recognize my iPhone being connected

2 - Once it does recognize the iPhone, it says no photos are in the iPhone

3 - If I mysteriously get it to load the photos and I go to import them, I get about 20 pictures in, and I get errors messages after about 5 minutes of a stalled import telling me that it couldn't 'load an asset' and gives me a list of a couple dozen files.

I've tried using Image Capture with no luck either :( Iphone syncs and backs up fine btw...

Any ideas? I need to store these photos!

Thanks!