I tried everything on this thread and still couldn't see all my folders...extremely frustrating.
I finally got it working and wanted to share what I learned. Below are all the steps I did. It's possible 1-2 were unnecessary, but after hours of fiddling these are the exact steps I took to finally get things working and I'm sharing them verbatim:
Super short version:
- Update driver from Device Manager (activating Windows Update for that device, from Device Manager) while iPhone is plugged in.
- Then take 1-2 minutes between clicking steps to open the iPhone folder, to give Windows a chance to cache/load the folder metadata before opening the photo/video folder.
Full step-by-step details below:
- I plugged in my iPhone to my computer, and on the iPhone selected Trust + entered PIN.
- I opened Windows Device Manager (Windows key+device manager and it should show in search), expanded the category "Universal Serial Bus devices", and right clicked on "Apple Mobile Device USB Composite Device", left clicked on "Update Driver"
- Selected "Search automatically for drivers" and then "search updated drivers on Windows update"
- This then took me to Windows Update, where it found an updated driver for the iPhone that it downloaded and installed...note that this only worked for me if the iPhone was plugged in and authenticated prior to/during this step
- I then disconnected my iPhone, waited a few seconds, reconnected, clicked Trust+entered PIN once again.
- I then opened Windows Explorer (Windows Key+E), clicked on Apple iPhone under "This PC"...waited 1 minute, then clicked on the iPhone folder, waited another 1 minute (if I skipped this step then it seemed not to load all the folders), THEN clicked "Internal Storage" after waiting that 1 minute.
It's possible that one of those two 1 minute delays weren't needed, but at least one of them definitely was...If I skipped it, it still only loaded 1/2 the folders (but I tried that before the driver update, and that alone didn't fix things).
Note also that I bought/tried a high-end 60Gbps USB-C cable, but in the end the much slower cable from Apple worked more reliably, despite taking forever to do the transfers (and needing me to batch the transfers to a couple months at a time).
Note also that (prior to doing the steps above) I already had the latest iOS version and I tried installing Apple Devices from the Microsoft Store. That seemed to give me a better driver that showed me a few more folders sometimes (even though the app itself didn't work for me since it wanted to backup a lot of things beyond photos, and I had to turn off my iCloud backups to enable that), but not quite the latest. I assume Windows Update had the very latest driver while Apple Devices had the "last known good" driver at the time of updating that software, but not actually the very latest driver.
I hope this helps others.
