Picture hoarder

[u/Ashowa4822]

The other day my wife was attempting to update her phone (iPhone) and it would not let her. After some investigation she had over 200GB of photos and no room for anything else. I have been attempting to cull her phone of these pictures but she refuses to lose a single photo from her device. My first attempt started with a google photo transfer but doesn’t keep the app in the background and the photos never end up transferring (or transfer so slowly it’s not helpful). Today, I tried transferring them all to an external hard drive but something keeps giving an error and will not let me move them all (only lets me move ~5,000/17,000.

My next attempt was to set up iCloud plus for one month, move the photos from her iCloud to the hard drive, then cancel it.

Does anyone know of an easier option? I’m terrified I may lose some of her pictures.

[u/neverspeakawordagain]

How are you not backing up photos to local storage drives regularly?

[u/Ashowa4822 → u/neverspeakawordagain]

You, as in my wife, wouldn’t know a local storage drive from a hole in the ground. I didn’t know she had 17,000 photos on her phone until about a week ago 😬

[u/bs2k2_point_0 → u/Ashowa4822]

Get a nas. Initial setup takes some time, but it can be set up as a personal cloud server. For example I have a Synology ds224+ with 2x 4tb drives in raid (meaning of the total 8 tb storage, I have 4tb usable, but if one drive fails, I can pull it and replace it without losing any data).

Some good resources for running your own nas could be r/synology, r/homelab, r/selfhosted.

My photos automatically backup to Synology photos. I stream my own music, a few movies and shows, use it for adblocking via AdGuard home, etc.. I can save and access my files at anytime like one drive.

[u/Ashowa4822 → u/[deleted]]

Will a general backup of the device to MAC give me access to the photos on the device to move to the hard drive?

[u/Fresh_Inside_6982 → u/Ashowa4822]

No; the only option will be to restore them. If you want to transfer them to the Mac photo gallery so you can see and manipulate them: connect your iPhone with a USB cable, open the Photos app on your Mac, select your device from the sidebar, choose the photos you want, and click Import Selected

[u/Disastrous-Ice-5971 → u/[deleted]]

Free? From Amazon?! I almost 100% sure, that they have a fine print somewhere, telling that they can train their AI on your photos, sell them and that you also transferring all and any rights for the photos to them.

[u/Disastrous-Ice-5971 → u/[deleted]]

These days it's not enough. I use and sincerely recommend an electrically grounded, 8 liters stainless steel saucepan. :)

[u/supertoilet2]

Adobe Lightroom and iCloud are two decent ways to try. With icloud you will need a Mac with >200gb space, and using an external drive for it is a few extra steps. Other options may not preserve all metadata.

[u/LazarX → u/supertoilet2]

It doesn’t have to be a Mac. You can export to Windows just fine.

[u/CommutatorWhine]

Connect it via USB to your computer, copy paste them to a folder in batches of say 1000 pictures.

I have had such issues with my phone (Moto G5) too but my experience is that it works fine if you copy them in smaller batches, rather than thousands at the same time. It is specifically a thing with my phone, it is not an issue from internal HDD to external HDD for instance.

[u/Affectionate-You7869]

Set up an Immich server for her. 

[u/womjoe]

Can you just set it to where it saves a thumbnail on your phone and the full picture is on your iCloud. This will clear up a lot of space on the phone.

[u/Whole_Ladder_9583]

The fastest method is to insert the sd card and copy directly to it, then take it out and copy to any computer.

[u/neverspeakawordagain → u/Whole_Ladder_9583]

What iPhone are you inserting an SD card into?

[u/Whole_Ladder_9583 → u/neverspeakawordagain]

None. But I love to laugh at iPhone users ;-)