photos on mac importing duplicate photos from iphone via usb

But before you switch off iCloud, download the photos from iCloud to your device, or you can no longer access them on your iPhone. Disable "Optimise iPhone Storage" if it is enabled and wait for the photos to download back to your iPhone. Do you have enough free storage to save all your photos on the iPhone?

Directly after turning off iCloud Photos all downloaded photos may appear again as new photos, but after that it should be back to normal, once no new downloads from iCloud will appear.

alternately, you could just use iCloud Photos to sync the photos from the Phone to your Mac. The important thing is to stick to one method of importing and not to mix the method of importing and syncing.

Hi

What version of MacOS do you have?

This normally happens when your phone is taking HEIC format pictures, but converting them on download to your mac to JPG because the mac cannot read HEIC Format (older Macos doesn't recognise them). Then when you connect your phone again, they are different filnames, so not recognised as already downloaded.

You can check by looking at the filenames - is it .jpg on your mac, and .heic on your phone?

To fix this you either need to upgrade your mac to a version that can work work with HEIC, or change your phone to take jpg (Settings>camera>formats>most compatible)

Is iCloud Photos enabled on the iPhone? Please check the Settings > Your Name > iCloud. iCloud Photos could have become enabled after a software upgrade without you noticing it.

If iCloud Photos should have become enabled on the iPhone, it will prevent the duplicates from being recognised, and you will get random results for duplicates. The same could happen, if My Photo Stream is enabled. If you are using any iCloud service for Photos at all on one of your devices, you need to check all photos manually for duplicates, when you try to import.