Previously synced photos won't transfer from iPhone to new Macbook

Hey CityFeedback,

You might be able to enable iCloud Photos, which will, in theory, store all photos and videos within your Photos library within iCloud. Then, if you turned on iCloud Photos on the Mac, all of those same items would become available there, but it would be an all or nothing deal, in that you wouldn't be able to pick and choose which bits of the iCloud Photos library gets shared with the new Mac. Something else to consider is that if you only have the 5GB free storage on your iCloud account, you likely will not have enough storage to sync the contents of your Photos library from your iPhone to iCloud. This can be resolved by potentially increasing your iCloud storage. More information about these topics will be listed below, as this is more of a broad overview and some details and context may be needed to fully delve in and understand.

Set up and use iCloud Photos has all the info on the ins and outs of iCloud Photos and how to set it up on all of your devices. It also explains some of the finer points, such as changes made to one version of a photo or video will sync across all devices where that content appears.

iCloud+ plans and pricing can be found here. It can vary a bit by region, so this should give you a good idea of what you're looking at if this is something you'd like to partake in.

If you have any other questions, feel free to post back.

Have a great day.

Hey CityFeedback,

We'd be happy to help out. Sounds like you used your old Mac to manually sync these photos to your iPhone. With that being said, these photos aren't technically a part of your Photos library, therefore cannot be deleted from your library, instead they'd be removed if you synced with the Photos library on your new Mac.

Natively, you wouldn't be able to extract those manually synced photos. Your best bet is to regain access to the old Mac though. What is the reason you "lost access"? Provide us some more details on that and we'll see how we can help.

If you have a backup of your old library or regain access to it, you can then import your photos from the old library using these steps: Import photos from another library in Photos on Mac - Apple Support

Take care!

Hello CityFeedback,

The only way to transfer these photos to your new Mac would be with the original source of these photos. There would not be a way to transfer these synced photos from your iPhone to your new Mac.

We would recommend looking to see if you stored these photos in another place such as iCloud, another cloud service, or another computer or external hard drive.

If you backed up your other Mac using Time Machine, you can use this article with your new Mac to regain access to your photo library: Restore your Mac from a backup

If the photos are not stored anywhere else, then there would not be a supported way to import these photos to your new Mac.

Best regards.