How to transfer photos (that no other Apple tool can detect) off an iPhone
Was helping a client regain control of her photo collection today, by consolidating it into the Photo Library on her iMac.
She had a massive collection on her iPhone and it was eating up much of the storage. Using Photos and a USB cable on the Mac, I imported the newest few dozen. Photos said some 700+ in the phone had already been imported and (of course) didn't provide an easy way of deleting them, so I prepared to delete them by hand... but found over 5,000 photos on the iPhone. The 700 already-imported photos that it was reporting were the youngest 700 -- the rest were over 10 years of memories from 2005 to 2017 (a date range that had next to no resident photos in the Photo Library). So by hand, I deleted the ones Photos knew about. Now Photos said there were no photos on the phone. But of course, there were -- roughly 5,000 more.
Trying to figure a good way of getting them into the Mac, I selected a swath of them and tried AirDrop. Some small percentage got through, others were left gray, and I got a fatal error message on the Mac. Tried several variations on this before giving it up as a bad idea.
Thought I'd try one of the third-party tools that read the iPhone's file system more or less directly, to get it to transfer them to the iMac. Downloaded iMazing from the App Store. Told it to look for photos. It did a fair amount of grinding, showing me non-trivial work was being done, and then... gave me exactly the same results as Photos. It showed no photos on the phone. Now, it knew about all the client's album names and subfolder organization, but showed nothing in any of them. For kicks, I asked it to look at the Recently Deleted folder, and that worked 100% properly as one would expect -- found all the photos I had recently deleted by hand. But nothing in the main library, which still had 5,000 photos in it that I could manually click on and view at the phone.
At this point, I was buffaloed, trying to think of any other explanation for what I was seeing. I've seen this sort of behavior when one downloads images one has received in Messages -- they show up on the phone as photos "from person X" and need to be "fully" committed to the library before they act like normal photos. But that wasn't the case here, and certainly not for 5,000 messages.
(And yes, I did try "powering it off and then turning it on again" -- both the iMac and the iPhone.)
I thought, perhaps this is an artifact of iCloud photos. But the only device using iCloud photos was her iPad, and we corrected that and then disabled iCloud photos (after first downloading them to the iMac). There were well under 500 in there in any case, and not from the date range observed.
So bottom line is that we managed to corral and consolidate all the client's photos, EXCEPT for about 5,000 of them that are still on her iPhone and which no Apple or third-party tool I tried can see from OUTSIDE the phone, except that Photos on the iPhone will still let you click and view them.
Does anybody have any clever ideas how to transfer them to the iMac?
(The iMac is a 2017 large-screen with fusion drive running Ventura; I don't have the iPhone details -- sorry -- but it's recent enough not to have a bottom button, and the iOS seemed recent enough as well, though not the Liquid Glass release.)
