importing from iPhone fails often

I’ve had this problem for the entire time I’ve had an iPhone and imported photos from it into iPhoto, which is over two years. When importing into iPhoto, the longer the import takes, the more likely it is to fail. The failure occurs during transfer, when iPhoto says “[x] Remaining” while the progress meter is filling up, and before “finishing import”. The error message is: “Error downloading image. iPhoto cannot import your photos because there was a problem downloading an image.” After the error the whole import is apparently canceled and I have to start over. Therefore I usually select just a small number of photos/videos and import. Repeat. This is very tedious.

Again this has been happening for over two years across multiple versions of iPhoto/iOS/OS X, and a few phone cables. The constants are the iPhone and the Mac running iPhoto are the same devices this whole time (iPhone 4S and 2010 Macbook Air). Current iPhoto is 9.5.1, and I’m tediously trying to import my large set of holiday photos right now.

Any ideas or suggestions would be welcome. Thank you.