Transferring Images Between iPhone and PC
image @AdobeStock
I am a Windows PC user and an Iphone user and 99% of the time I’m happy with that combination. My Surface Studio is by far the best computer I have ever owned, and my Surface Studio Laptop is a work horse of a device as well. Plus, I have built in tech support for Windows devices and my husband’s employee discount, so that is reason enough alone to stick with my current setup. But the one time I am exceptionally jealous of Mac users is the ease with which they can transfer photos between their phone and computer.
There are workarounds for PC users, but all of them have downsides (which I’ll share below). I can’t count the number of times I have thrown down my phone in frustration and threatened to switch to Mac, solely for the ability to Air Drop images between my phone and computer. I’m going to share what I’ve tried, and what finally worked exactly the way I wanted it and finally saved me from cluttering up my e-mail inbox transferring things between devices.
iCloud: My phone is set to backup to iCloud, and there is an iCloud app for PC. While this method technically works, the iCloud PC app is annoying…it’s weirdly resource intensive for what it is, and worse yet it started prompting me to sign-in constantly (even though I never signed out) and just kept popping up annoyingly while trying to do other work. In the end I just couldn’t deal and uninstalled it from my PC altogether.
OneDrive: So I will start with the fact that I love OneDrive on the whole. I have more than one (personal and corporate) and the number of terabytes of data I have stored in there is almost embarrassing. The OneDrive iOS app works quite well, significantly better than the iCloud app for PC, and I use it all the time for accessing documents and such when I’m away from my computer. Once you install the OneDrive app on your phone there is an option to automatically backup your camera roll, and I always leave this turned on just so that my iPhone pictures are stored in a second place. But the camera roll backup isn’t perfect- it’s often a bit delayed, not helped along by the fact that I’m bad about keeping the app open on my Phone. In addition to that, when I only need an image or two, it just takes too long- I’m sure this is partly because I have so much stuff in my OneDrive, but when I’m literally looking at the photo I want on my phone and pulling it up on my PC requires digging through multiple layers of folders (and let’s face it, picture previews on a cloud drive are annoyingly slow to load, and iPhone doesn’t display photo names by default so identifying the exact image I want is another step). Of course, none of this is unsurmountable, but when I know my Mac friends are just nicely air dropping things back and forth between devices while I’m sitting around scrolling through file structures it feels clunky.
Lightroom Mobile I use Lightroom Classic on my computer, and Lightroom Mobile on my phone and laptop (topic for another day). I actually sync collections between Lightroom Classic and Mobile all the time - usually in that direction. Although I don’t really use Lightroom on my phone for editing, when I finish editing a collection of images on my PC, I set that collection to sync to the Lightroom Cloud and then I have all of my final, edited images, available in Lightroom on my phone. It’s a really nice way to have those images at my fingertips for sharing with others, and I love that when I get back from a trip or whatever and people ask to see photos I have the collection of final, edited images on my phone ready to share. So for that use case, Lightroom works really well. What I do not do however, is set Lightroom mobile to automatically import my Camera Roll. You may want to, but honestly my Camera Roll is often filled with junk that I don’t want cluttering up my Lightroom catalog- random screen shots, reference images, photos of the car in a parking garage so I remember where I parked…none of that belongs in my Lightroom Catalog and if you have automatically import from Camera Roll turned on, it takes everything. Yes, I could go back and delete it all but seriously, I will never stay on top of that. Plus, even if you do keep your camera roll in your lightroom mobile catalog, that still only gets it as far as Lightroom on your PC, and you still have to go export the image to actually use it, which is another step that my Mac/iPhone friends just don’t have to do.
USB Cable While all of these methods so far use the magic of Cloud computing to transfer images, it is still possible to go old school and simply plug an Iphone into a PC. Honestly this works fine, and I actually do use it to transfer large number of images between my phone and computer. While I mentioned above that I don’t import my camera roll into the Lightroom Mobile app, I actually do keep a separate Lightroom Classic Catalog for my Iphone images. And every few weeks months, I plug my phone into my PC, copy the images onto my external hard drive and then import those images into my iPhone catalog. This is a post for another time, so if you want an explanation as to why I use a separate catalog ask me and I’ll write a post for it, but for now I am getting off topic. Yes, this works for transferring images. But again- I just want to be able to airdrop images like an Apple user, not go hunting for the correct USB cable and then search through iPhones folder structure to find the image I want.
So all of that brings me to my final, actual, slightly imperfect but so-close-I-can’t-complain Solution: The PhotoSync App. After frantically scouring the internet with queries such as “How to Airdrop between iPhone and PC” I came across this little gem of an app called PhotoSync. It does exactly what it says, and no more. You install the app on both devices (it works on iPhone, I believe it works on Android, and also Windows), open the app select the device you are transferring to, select the image you want to sync and hit transfer. Wow- that sounds like a lot of steps when I type it out, but I swear it takes less time than texting a photo to someone. You can sync multiple images at once, you can keep the app on multiple devices and choose which one you are syncing to (iOS) or drag the image into the app (PC). It’s so simple. Supposedly it works for transferring videos although I haven’t used it for that purpose.
The app has 4.8 stars in the iPhone App store if that says anything. I will say that the one downside I’ve run into is that occasionally it has trouble automatically finding the device I want to transfer to, and I have to manually type in the IP address, but the app walks you through the steps and it takes about 20 seconds to do. Both devices need to be on the same wifi network to transfer and by default I have my computer and phone set to connect to completely separate networks, so I do have to take half a second to swap the connection for one or the other (I often forget this step before opening the apps, which is probably why I sometimes have to manually find the device instead of having it be automatic).
I still occasionally think that it would be convenient to airdrop between my phone and my computer but I no longer throw my phone in frustration, and I no longer send myself multiple e-mails a day just to transfer images.