Can't import photos from iPhone on Windows

[qseep]

Photo import from my iPhone used to work. For the past several months it has not been working. I have updated to the latest version of Lightroom Classic. I am using the latest Windows 10 and an iPhone XS.

What happens is this: I plug my iPhone into my computer via a USB port (I have tried multiple USB ports and multiple cables). Then iTunes pops up and usually wants to do some syncing. So I let it do that. Then I open Lightroom and click Import. Sometimes the iPhone doesn't show up in the import list. If not then I try shutting down Lightroom, unplugging the iPhone and plugging it back in again.

Once the iPhone shows up in the import list, I select it. It will show a bunch of photo icons with check boxes. I have it set to "Don't import suspected duplicates". Many of the icons will gradually get replaced by thumbnails. But many will say "Preview not available". Which I find strange. I scroll down and let it fill in as many thumbnails as it can.

Then I click Import. It brings up the "Copy and import photos" progress bar on the top left, which shows 1%. After a few minutes, it will show a dialog box titled Import Results. It says "Some import operations were not performed." It has two expandable sections: "The files already exist in the catalog. (25)" and "The files are not photos or videos. (1)." I find it odd that it would complain that files already exist in the catalog, since I have set it to ignore files already in the catalog. I click OK to close this dialog.

But it's still stuck in import mode. The "Copy and import photos" progress bar still shows about 1%, never finishes. I have to hit the X on it and wait a bit in order for it to stop.

Then it shows another Import Results dialog. It says "The following files were not imported because they could not be read or the destination folder is not writable." And it lists expandable sections for Items 1-5244, in groups of 100. Well that's odd because in Windows Explorer, it still shows the iPhone. It has not been disconnected. I close that dialog.

Now it's showing some view with some photos. I can't tell whether those are photos that were just imported, or they already were in my catalog.

This is very frustrating as I can't import my files, and will lose them as I don't have any other backup. Well, they do get backed up to Google Photos, but that's not a very easy thing to restore from. If anyone can help, that would be much appreciated.

I'm ready to quit using Lightroom over this. Problem is, I don't know that it would be any better with any other software.

I can now do another import, but it's the same thing all over again.

I've read some advice that says to import the photos to your computer by copying them via Windows Explorer. Then import them into Lightroom. Well, that doesn't work either. It will stop partway through copying them and say there was an error. Even if it did work, it would probably copy all the files, and I only want to copy the new ones.

I have even tried this with my phone set to not automatically lock, wondering whether the screen locking was preventing photo transfer. But that didn't help.

[qseep]

I should note that even though I can navigate through the iPhone's DCIM folder on Windows, I'm no longer able to open the photos. So it seems like something is timing out somewhere, cutting off access. Don't know if it's the iPhone, or Windows.

[Jao vdL]

The easiest way to get your photos from your phone into Classic is to set your Classic catalog to sync with the cloud but you don't have to actually sync anything. Make sure to set up Lightroom Sync to sync into the same location as where you would normally import your images to such as the screenshot below (this is the Classic Preferences screen)

with the specific location set to where I have my normal imports happen and using the same dated subfolder structure I use. Then simply install Lightroom on your phone, log on to your Adobe account and import images from the photo roll into Lightroom. They will sync over the web into your Classic folder automatically.

[qseep]

Thanks for the advice, but that ran into problems, too. I set up Lightroom Classic as you specified. I installed Lightroom on my phone and set it to import images from the photo roll into Lightroom. sd

It uploaded a bunch of photos to the Lightroom Cloud, and then it said it was almost out of space in the cloud (I have the 20 GB default). There were some 4447 (51%) photos pending to upload. I left it running overnight. In the morning it still said there were 3563 pending (74%). The screen had blanked, which is strange because the night before I know it was set to stay awake as long as it was still uploading and connected to power. Also the warning about "Cloud Storage Almost Full" still showed the same figures: I had used 17.4 GB out of 20.0 GB. I'd expect that to be full by now. It says there are 992 photos in the cloud storage.

I got the impression from your instructions that it wouldn't use cloud storage, just bypass that and go straight to Lightroom Classic. I don't want to use cloud storage because as you see I don't have enough even for my photos/videos on the phone, never mind all of them in Lightroom. I don't want to pay a monthly charge for cloud storage when I should just be able to store them on my Windows machine.

I don't think it copied any photos onto my Windows machine in Lightroom Classic. I'm not sure - how can I tell? I don't know exactly which photos were there before I started the sync from the phone. I see that in the Preferences for Lightroom Sync, it still shows no Sync Activity. Perhaps I need to right-click on the destination folder and select "Synchronize Folder"? I'm going to try that.

[Ian Lyons]

The only photos that don't count towards your cloud stoarge are those imported directly imported into Lightroom Classic then synced with your cloud account. The reason being that smart previews rather than the full raw photos are synced to the cloud. The 17.4GB of photos imported from you phones camera roll into Lightroom are counted towards your 20GB quota, hence you getting a warning about running out of storage. 

[qseep]

OK, thanks. So, this is not a good strategy for getting my photos into Lightroom Classic.

So that goes back to my original question - why is photo import from my iPhone not working correctly in Lightroom Classic, as stated in the original post?

For the record, iTunes is able to connect to my iPhone just fine over USB, and do everything it does.

Also, I tried importing photos onto a MacBook using Image Capture. It seems to have captured almost everything. It ended with an error dialog, saying it couldn't import 364 items. It only lists 5 of the items that weren't imported, and they were all MOV files, but that could just be a coincidence. The destination folder contains 4,434 JPG files, 634 MOV files, 488 AAE files, 25 PNG files, and 1 GIF file. Meanwhile the Photo Roll on the phone says it has 3,989 Photos, 556 Videos. (2 screenshots were added since I did the import.)

I don't really understand why there are more photos, even JPG files alone, in the captured directory, than are reported to exist in the camera roll on the phone. Maybe some of them are thumbnails for the MOV files.

In any case, since 364 items didn't get imported, for some unknown reason, I still can't be sure I have all my files, and it's hard to tell what's missing.

[Jao vdL]

The trick with going through the cloud with a 20GB subscription is to when a bunch of images has arrived in Classic is to unsync them whihc you do by removing them from the all synced photographs collection or simply by clicking the small sync icons on the images. They will be deleted from the cloud but will remain in Classic. This allows you to transfer much larger amounts of data through the cloud than 20GB.

[qseep]

Ah, OK. Well, that sounds tricky. I guess I'd have to wait for Lightroom Classic to be done syncing, then go delete photos from the cloud. Then hopefully it would start uploading photos from the phone's camera roll again, until the cloud storage was full again or it was done. Then repeat the process.

[Jao vdL]

>I don't really understand why there are more photos, even JPG files alone, in the captured directory, than are reported to exist in the camera roll on the phone. Maybe some of them are thumbnails for the MOV files.

Are you using iCloud photos on the phone. There is a setting in the settings app in the Photos section for this. By default it will optimize your phone storage and offload photos and movies to the cloud from the photoroll. This can result in less images physically being in the DCIM folder when you import from it and might be the cause of your issues. If this is the case, simply run Photos on the MacBook with the iCloud Photo library enabled and you should be able to get all images through there. I am not sure if you can easily sync the images to a windows machine from iCloud library though.

Lastly, the windows version of Lightroom Classic does not support HEVC H265 formatted video which is the default that is used on iPhones nowadays. The Mac version of Classic does support it. There is a setting in Settings->Camera on your phone in the Formats section that you might want to set to most compatible if you use Classic on windows with the video from your phone. Lastly, there is another setting in Settings->Photos called "Transfer to MAC or PC" all the way at the bottom that you usually need to set to "Keep Originals" as otherwise the phone tries to transcode the movies to H264 and HEIF images to jpegs live and that might cause the transfer to timeout and cause confusion in the transfer. You might want to experiment with that setting.

[qseep]

I'm not using iCloud Photos on the phone, or the Photos app on the Mac. I don't want to pay for Apple's cloud storage either. I can't sync to Photos because I'm running macOS Mojave, and it refuses to connect iTunes or Photos to the phone without updating to Mavericks.

I found out about the iPhone Settings > Photos > Transfer to Mac or PC from another web page. It had been set to Automatic, which is why Image Capture was converting all the files to JPG. And potentially why Image Capture failed on a few files. So I deleted all the imported files, and changed that setting on the iPhone to Keep Originals. I was also worried that if it failed, I wouldn't know which files had failed to be copied. But I found there was a checkbox in Image Capture you could check to delete the pictures from the phone after import, so I checked that. I did another import using Image Capture to the MacBook. And it took less than half an hour, and perfectly copied all the files.

My objective now is to copy these files to the PC, and them import them into Lightroom Classic. Hopefully it will convert all the HEIC files and such.

At first I copied them on a flash drive that had plenty of room. But it turned out to be Mac formatted, so the PC couldn't read it. So I deleted that copy, and now I'm copying them using a different flash drive, but it's smaller so I will have to do two trips.

I ended up deleting all the photos in the cloud storage before it finished syncing into Classic. I figure if I'm going to get the files from the Mac via the flash drive, that will just be redundant.

[qseep]

As for the setting on the phone in Settings > Camera > Formats which I can set to Most Compatible, thanks for that tip. I think that only applies to new photos/videos, so it won't help with the current transfer, but could help in the future. I think at the time I got the phone, I saw that setting, but I left it set at High Efficiency, because I didn't want to waste storage space on the phone.

Turns out in the end I have a ton of space on my phone, so maybe that wasn't necessary.

[qseep]

Well, that worked to import the remaining image files. But now I have a problem of duplicate images. There are a bunch of HEICs that already had a JPG imported through other menans. It won't recognize those as duplicates on import. So now I have to figure out how to get rid of the duplicates, without manually finding and deleting every one.

I can find all the cases where there's a HEIC file and a JPG file with the same name except for the extension. I could delete all such JPG files. But that wouldn't remove them from the catalog. I guess I can then rescan the catalog or something?

And like you said, the HVEC files are not importing into Lightroom Classic, even though I can view them just fine in Windows. I'm attempting to use Handbrake to convert them in batch to H.264.

[Jao vdL]

It's very annoying that Adobe still hasn't updated classic for windows with HEVC support. The Mac version has had it for two years now and the Cloud Lightroom has supported it for a while too even on windows.  Handbrake should work for conversion for sure.

For duplicates, this is one of the missing features in Lightroom for sure. It can't automatically find duplicates. There are a bunch of plugins that can do it. I found a post with explanations on how to find duplicates, even if they are different extensions here: https://www.creative-photographer.com/find-duplicate-images-lightroom/

[qseep]

Thanks for your suggestions on the duplicates. I'll look into that.

I'm worried about preserving metadata with the Handbrake conversion though. All the original files had timestamps which is critical to me sorting it into the correct folder, showing the right timestamp in Lightroom, etc. The files converted with Handbrake (H.264 M4V) all have creation dates of when the file was converted. So I may need a script to update those. I wonder whether Handbrake has some setting for that, that I missed.

Also, each HEVC (MOV) file has an associated AAE sidecar file. Perhaps that contains some valuable metadata? Should I keep the sidecar file with the converted files when importing into Lightroom? Will they even work with the converted files?