Moving a whole photo library off a phone without losing any of it

Copying ten thousand photos is a different task from copying one, and the ways it goes wrong are specific. The worst of them is silent: the copy finishes, reports success, and what you have are not the originals.

Before anything: the optimised-storage trap

If iCloud Photos → Optimise iPhone Storage is on, the full-resolution originals are not on your phone. The device holds smaller versions and fetches the original from iCloud when you open one. Copying over a cable in this state gets you the small versions — and there is no warning, because nothing failed.

Android has the same shape of problem: Google Photos "Free up space" deletes local copies of anything already backed up, leaving the phone with a gallery that is really a view of the cloud.

• iPhone: Settings → Photos → Download and Keep Originals, then wait for the download to finish. This needs enough free space for the whole library, which is precisely why optimisation was turned on. If it will not fit, download from iCloud.com on the computer instead.
• Android: use Google Takeout or download from photos.google.com rather than copying from the phone. Whatever is only in the cloud does not exist on the device to copy.

The paired-file problem

A Live Photo is two files: a .heic still and a .mov clip that share a name. Copy only the images and you have silently discarded half of each. The same applies to RAW+JPEG pairs from pro camera modes, and to Motion Photos on Android.

Copy the whole DCIM folder rather than filtering by type, and if you sort by extension to "tidy up", you are separating pairs that need to stay together.

Doing the copy

1. Count first. The phone tells you how many photos and videos it holds — write the number down. It is the only way to verify afterwards.
2. Copy in batches, not all at once. A single 40,000-file MTP transfer will fail somewhere in the middle, and you will not know where. Copy folder by folder — DCIM is already split into subfolders of about a thousand.
3. Keep the phone unlocked and plugged in. Storage is unmounted when the screen locks, which is the most common cause of a copy that stops at 60% with no error.
4. Do not use the phone during the copy. Taking a photo mid-transfer changes the folder underneath the operation.
5. Compare the count. Right-click the destination folder → Properties and read the file count. It should match, allowing for Live Photo pairs counting as two.
6. Open ten at random from the copy — from different subfolders, including a video. This catches truncation and the optimised-storage trap in one step.
7. Then, and only then, delete from the phone. Ideally not the same day.

Which route for a big library

• Under a few gigabytes: any route works, including a transfer service. See the six ways.
• Tens of gigabytes, Android → Windows: USB is the only sensible choice. Copy DCIM subfolder by subfolder.
• Tens of gigabytes, Android → Mac: the cable is the hard part — see why the cable does nothing. An SD card or Google Takeout will be less painful.
• Tens of gigabytes, iPhone → Windows: the Photos import wizard stalls on large batches; copy from DCIM by hand instead. Set Transfer to Mac or PC to Automatic first, or you will get HEIC files Windows cannot open — see iPhone to Windows.
• Any size, no cable available: download from the cloud on the computer. Slower, but it cannot half-finish silently.

One thing to decide before you send any of them onward

Photos carry GPS coordinates and timestamps inside the file. Archiving them yourself is fine; forwarding a batch to someone else hands over the location of everywhere they were taken — see what your files say about you.

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