Photos will not import from iPhone. Big Sur 11.3. iOS 14.4

I have the same issue. Mine is MBA M1 Big Sur with iP12. Tried every mentioned suggestions but none is working. I just wonder why Apple left this ******** untouched for so long without an official solution. I can see people reporting the same issue since 2014 @@

Money

Thanks, but it doesn't work for me.

I have the same question it just hangs there and I cannot import my photos to my Mac

This fixed my problem!! Super Helpful!!! Thank You

But did it important full res files? or just thumbnails???

I have a similar issue with my Macbook Air with Big Sur 11.5.2. The Photos screen hangs with Preparing to import from...; however, if I plug in and out the iPhone/iPad cable three or four times, using the eject function in Finder every time, eventually Photos will show all the photos and I can manage to import the ones I need.

It's ridiculous that this naive issue has been there over generations of iPhone. Just upgraded my Mac and tried every mentioned suggestions again but still not working. If I am lucky, it will appear after plug/unplug the iPhone several times.

This solution, posted on MacRumors by LaneyLad on March 8, 2021 [bold added by me] worked. I have about 14,000 new photos to import from my iPhone 12 to my iMac Intel on Big Sur, because the problem started with Mojave and I had given up importing to iMac 18 months ago. A few days ago I decided so solve the problem once and for all and I left my iPhone connected, and my iMac on no sleeping, for 14 hours with no success. Today I applied the following solution, connected my iPhone, launched Photos, and got the "Preparing ... " message, but after about 30 seconds thumbnails began appearing.

"It's always the way but after I write and complain about it ... I manage to find the solution. On the iPhone, go to Settings -> Photos, at the bottom of the options there is a section called "Transfer to Mac or PC", it defaults to Automatic, I changed it

to Keep Originals and then only had to wait for about 5 mins on the preparing to import screen before all the 27,000 photos appeared. I believe that the checking of all the photos for compatibility was slowing [or completely preventing] the process so much it just seemed unresponsive. I think Apple should really change this default or disable automatic once you are above a certain number of photos!"

OK, I had this problem, and in my case it turned out to be quite simple: there simply wasn't enough space on the drive where my Photos database is located to import the new images. Made some space, and then it import worked.

But here's my complaint: Photos never said, "Hey, there's no space on my drive!" It simply responded to my import images command by switching to the imports screen, as it always does, and then simply did ... nothing. This is the kind of behavior that I expect from a Windows app, not from an Apple one.