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Kuro Tanaka

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 1, 2013
39
64
iOS: 12.3.1
MacOS: 10.14.5
Applications: Mac Photos, Image Capture, iTunes

I'm unable to transfer photos from my iPhone and have tried the below without any luck.

Any ideas in troubleshooting the issue would be appreciated.

Connecting the iPhone to my Mac, I can see the device in Photos, Image Capture and iTunes applications. Note that each application was tested in isolation meaning that there was no other applications running.

Photos
The iPhone is displayed under Devices however no photos are shown and therefore I'm unable to transfer photos to the Mac. Thinking that the phone was taking a long time to prepare the photos for viewing, I waited over night but still there were no photos displayed.

Image Capture
Connecting the iPhone to the Mac with Image Capture running I receive the following message, "Please Wait. Photos in the Camera Roll of "iPhone" are being prepared.". The message disappears after about 5 minutes and again no photos are shown and therefore I'm unable to transfer photos to the Mac.

iTunes
The iPhone can be backed up successfully to iTunes however there isn't an option to transfer photos.

The iPhone has been restarted a number of times including restarting the phone after connecting it to the Mac with the relevant application running e.g. Image Capture.

The trust between the iPhone and the Mac has been reset.

Have tried another Mac and received the same results so I think that the issue is on the iPhone. Have tried another lightning cable.

Any help would be appreciated.
- KT
 

dragon671556

macrumors regular
Dec 29, 2013
125
47
Reset your iphone and then try it again. You are not wiping the device you will not lose any pictures. Go to Settings>General and go down to Reset>Reset All Settings. That's what worked for me with my phone and windows 10; and it will work with Mac. The Genius bar did this for me Saturday and as long as I don't try to copy too many pictures at once it should work. Genuis bar told me if this didn't work we would have to erase the device and reload ios.
 

Kuro Tanaka

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 1, 2013
39
64
I have found a solution without needing to reset the phone.

From the iPhone go to Settings \ Display & Brightness and change Auto-Lock to Never.

Once you connect the phone to your Mac go to the Photos app and you will see the iPhone listed under Devices.

It can take 5 minutes or more but eventually all your iPhone photos will be displayed allowing you to import them into the Photos app.

The thinking is that due to the large number of photos it was taking a long time for all the phones to load and with Auto-Lock enabled the connection would time out and therefore no photos would be displayed under Devices.
 
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