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transfer photos from iphone to external hard drive

What is the best way to transfer pictures and videos from your iphone/ipad to an external hardrive?

iPhone 4, iOS 5.1.1

Posted on Aug 4, 2012 1:49 PM

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69 replies

Jan 3, 2017 12:33 AM in response to TownieBrownie

Thanks to your answer! This way works well, but it's a little slowly when I transfer photos from my iPhone to external hard drive. BTW, I have thousands of photos and videos about 50 G. In the end, I have to use FonePaw iOS Transfer which is helpful. It only took me a few minutes to transfer about 20 G photo files from iPhone to external hard drive.

Aug 24, 2017 6:14 PM in response to ipjoe

OMG I've been trying to work this out and look it up for ages. The tough part before reading this post is having a large phone and a small SSD drive and not enough room on the laptop to transfer and back up. This image capture is finally the answer to my prayers. Backing up photos as I type this and can feel my phone about to free up a truck load of space 🙂 Thank you ipjoe, one of the best small bits of information I've come across yet!!!

Aug 4, 2012 1:53 PM in response to ipjoe

I'll assume you are talking about the pictures and videos in the Camera Roll. Once you connect the phone to the computer, you would import them in the same way that you do the ones from a digital camera. If you use Windows, it should show up in Auto Run. If using a Mac, I belive you select either iPhoto or another program to import them. Settings in the Import app for Windows lets you select the location to import to, I would imagine that is the same for a Mac.

Jan 31, 2013 9:04 AM in response to ipjoe

Felt I should post the answer since it took me forever to figure out and I have found no clear/ accurate explantion when in here or googling online.


Go to Finder in the dock at the bottom of the page (usually all the way left with a face)

Select Applications

Select Image Capture


Should be very clear how to do it after this.

But just in case:

Icon of iphone will be on the left under Devices and your pictures should automatically pop up and then at the bottom it says Import to: and you select other and then select your external harddrive.

Apr 2, 2013 8:53 AM in response to TownieBrownie

UPDATE:


I have just realized that when you do this, on the bottom left of Image Capture you can scroll down and adjust the setting so that when plug you iphone into your computer that image capture automatically pops up and not iPhoto or make it so no import program pops up at all. At the very least I am glad to have the option to not have iPhoto automatically pop up because I don't like it.


Also- you can select the box below this to have photos automatically deleted from your phone after they import. I was doing it manually on my phone and obviously this takes a while.

Apr 26, 2013 9:11 AM in response to ipjoe

You can also use iCloud if you have set it up...just turn on the Photo Stream on any device that you want to use it with (if you have an iPod for example) and have iCloud downloaded to your computer then your photos will automatically be uploaded to the iCloud and then downloaded to your devices (including computer) when connected to wifi.
It's a really handy way to transfer photos from iPhone to hard drive easily.

transfer photos from iphone to external hard drive

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