Q: Cannot download photos or videos from iPhone

I should add - this is an iPhone 5S that is running 9.2.1, connecting to a laptop running 10.11.3.   Also, I can connect and sync the phone to Photos without problem, but it will only see and download new photos.   Everything prior to some date around late last year is inaccessible.

The photos are currently on the iPhone.   They're under the default album names  - 'All Photos' and 'Videos'.   No unique album names have been created.

Hmmm...well, no - there's no Album called Camera Roll.   The Album names showing are All Photos, Selfies, Videos, Screenshots, etc.   All are default and unedited.   And the same applies on the phone.   No such album as 'Camera Roll'- I think that disappeared in recent years/OSes, didn't it?   Not sure....

This issue is driving me insane - I know have 549 photos on my iPhone, but when I connect it to Photos app, it says, 'No Photos'.   My iPhone is completely unusable as it's so full, and there seems to be no way to get these photos off the phone?   Help!

The photos are on the phone, in the All Photos Album.   This is my wife's phone, and although she is a member of my iCloud 'Family', the Photos app on my Mac cannot see her photos, because iCloud Photo Library is turned off there, for the reason that my entire photo library is far larger than even the largest iCloud account, and so I cannot have it turned on.  My own phone works fine - it has iCloud Photo Library turned off, and I download photos from it via USB.  But connecting the wife's phone via USB just grabs random photos from the phone.   I cannot turn off iCloud Photo Library on her phone because her iCloud Library is far too big to download to her phone.  And I cannot download all 2000 of her photos from her iCloud account because it's impossible to pick them other than one at a time.

It's a conundrum....

Thanks for your (it's late in Maine!) reply...   Yes, iCloud Photo Library is turned on, and she already has Optimize Photos turned on, so most of the photos on the phone are already lowrez versions.   The problem is that the phone can no longer download the full rez versions of the photos as that library is simply too large now.   And as I said, the web iCloud Photos app is useless as you can't select 'Download All Photos' - you have to pick them one by one.   All I want to do is stop iCloud photo syncing on her phone grab all the full rez photos from wherever I can get them onto my Mac, at which point I can delete the photos from the phone and start out afresh with a workable plan.

I've been through all those articles and unfortunately there's no help for this problem in any of them.   It seems I'm really very stuck.   But many thanks for trying to help.

I finally got out of the hole.   I was wrong - in the web iCloud Photo Library I was in fact able to click the first picture in All Photos, hold down Shift, and click the last picture and then select to Download all the pictures and videos.   It was again, but it worked - I downloaded the full rez versions from the web, imported them into Photos, then got busy deleting them off the phone.   Now I have some working space, I can finish the job by turning off iCloud Photo Library on the phone.

Once all that's done, I believe I can then consider if I want to turn iCloud syncing back on across all three devices.   I also discovered I was wrong about the size of iCloud I could get, and I upgraded my account (at least temporarily) to be able to sync the main library back to the web.