I’m trying to help a family member to migrate from an Android phone to an iPhone (14). They first tried the preferred Apple method themselves, but that failed (multiple times).
They care most about keeping their contacts and photos/videos.
I managed to transfer contacts using Google Contacts and am now trying the same for photos/videos, but the Android phone is only uploading ~1500 photos, although there are ~2600 photos/videos on it. Also, the upload is taking long…
Before this upload I already transferred all media from the Android phone to my Mac using a USB-C cable. That resulted in ~4000 files (I don’t understand the large difference in all these numbers…), but I don’t know how to get those files on an iPhone 14…
If it was an iPhone with USB-C I could use a memory stick, but the iPhone 14 still has a lightning connector. I don’t want to sync the media using Finder, since she won’t be connecting to my Mac in the future (and I doubt whether she can manage photos on the iPhone herself then). Since it’s my Mac and her iPhone, I can’t use iCloud either.
How can I copy a large amount of photos/videos from my Mac to somebody else’s iPhone?
Trivia first - there are/were some usb sticks that have lightning on one end and USB-C on the other. (Not that I would bother with them?)
From my own experience, when trying to move large volumes of files or photos, if it doesn’t work flawlessly with the recommended technique, the first thing I do is break it up into manageable size chunks.
It’s more work to figure out a scheme (by topic, by date range, or some other criteria), but the added work “up front” makes it a lot easier to transfer and keep track of which chunks work and which need to be retried.
I usually just delete the bad chunk and try again instead of trying to use a more sophisticated sync or merge operation on the fraction of the chunk that did transfer ok.
Breaking the task into two steps - getting everything off Android to “somewhere”, and then getting them from “somewhere” to the iPhone does again help work through a problematic situation.
If you’ve got the photos on a Mac, have you considered creating another user on the Mac with the target iPhone AppleID, moving the files on the Mac into that user account on the Mac, and then using Apple photos or iCloud to copy them from the Mac to the iPhone? (just thinking out loud on this, haven’t considered the issues or problems so do your own feasibiity/research if this has potential for you.)
The Apple preferred method erases the iPhone at the start, so can’t do batches?
I’ve considered AirDrop, but both all photos at once and one single large zip file (containing them all) fail to even start the transfer. It might be a lot of trial & error to find out which number of photos (or size) would actually work…
I didn’t consider adding a second user and using iCloud. That might work, but might take long? And I’m not 100% sure about the consequences of using another Apple Account on my Mac…
I find it strange (and disappointing) that you can easily transfer photos from iPhone to Mac using a cable, but not the other way around.
I’d probably look at iMazing for this, given the issues, now that you have everything on your Mac.
Imazing → synced photo library on the phone
Select all → get into the regular photo library. Not sure if you have to save files first on the phone and then save images. Also not sure if iMazing can directly save to a folder in the Files app to save that extra step if it’s going to be needed.
I’ve never had good luck with Airdrop for more than 1 file. For me, it seems to attempt to transfer all the files in parallel rather than one by one. Large files or large number of files always hang and never complete when I try to use it.
Not for what you are trying to do, but in general, multiple accounts on a Mac work well. Each account will have it’s own system library folders for cloud services content, etc.
I don’t try to use file sharing or change the default file sharing/security settings to allow multiple accounts on a Mac to have shared sets of files. I know it can be done, but my Unix skills are too rusty (to understand what is going on underneath), and I don’t want to troubleshoot the added complexity.
But, back to topic, if you are trying to use Apple photos and/or icloud to transfer, multiple accounts on a Mac should not be a problem.
I have a license for iMazing 3 for my iPhone and iPad, but would rather not “waste” a free slot on an iPhone that’s not mine and for which I would use iMazing only once (my iPad is very outdated; I might need the spare slot for a new iPad).
In particular since they don’t seem to sell additional slots anymore; only subscriptions?
I would encourage you to waste that slot to help this person, if localsend type solutions don’t get it done.
I’m currently paying for a year of iMazing because a few months ago, it was the only way to help a friend rescue contacts from an old iPhone that had been inadvertently destroyed on the current one. Felt good about spending $40 to save the day for them.
As I wrote before I did indeed use Google Contacts to convert her contacts.
And her old Android phone is currently uploading all her photos to Google Photos so that we can download them to her iPhone later today. This will probably work, but it’s a lengthy process and I was/am hoping to find a better solution.
It also bothers me that Google Photos only uploads ~1500 photos, although her phone lists about ~2600, so this slow transfer might still be incomplete…
I tried LocalSend using my own devices and it seems to work flawlessly!
AirDrop just silently quit before even starting to transfer the 5 GB zip file, but LocalSend completed the entire transfer from Mac to iPhone in less than 2 minutes…
(I could then unzip the file and save everything in the photo roll. Disclaimer: I tried this last part only with a zip file containing only a couple of photos; not the entire ~4000 phots/videos 5 GB zip file)
I visited her to fetch her phone and started working some more on this.
The transfer went fine (as soon I connected both my Mac and her phone to the same WiFi network; I had hers on a guest network before), but another Apple failure: after selecting all ~5000 fotos/videos in the Files app and saving them in the photo roll I ended up with less than ~3000 items in that photo roll…
The difference in the file count might be because of hidden sidecar files or something along that line.
I was helping a client a couple of days ago. Keep their files on their Android phone and delete everything from Google Photos. I thought I saw something like that during one of my transfer attempts.
After transferring all photos in 1 large zip file from my a Mac to her iPhone, using LocalSend, I unzipped the file, selected all photos and chose the option to save them in the photo roll (in Apple’s Files app).
That started, showed no progress and stopped prematurely, with less than ~2000 photos out of ~4000) stored in the photo roll. I tried a few more times and then ended up with way more than 4000 photos. Only then I discovered that all those failed attempts created copies… Some photos were still missing, some were unique and several had a random number of copies…
I deleted everything in the photo roll and then copied all photos from my Mac to the photo roll using LocalSend and that succeeded in one go (with a clear progress bar during the transfer), resulting in each photo being there exactly one.
I’m so disappointed in how many times Apple’s first party software failed spectacularly in this exercise…
