I surrender: Need photos s/w

[navychop]

Moving photos to my PC from the iPhone loses date and other data.

I'm now willing to crack open the change purse and PAY for a program to move and organize all those photos from my 6+, and retain all that data. I'm looking for simple and easy. No need for photo editing- I have plenty of other programs that do that.

Recommendations?

 

[klang]

What method are you using that isn't working correct?

I'm wondering if you first put the photos in iCloud if the iCloud software on the PC would retain the photo data?

 

[navychop]

I can try that. USB not good for data retention.

 

[TheForce]

Meta data is normally lost during any kind of re-encoding so you need to do transfers that do not re-encode if you are losing metadata.

You should look for a file transfer app for the iphone. Just do a search for that in the app store.

This is how they work-
You install the app and then access your photos within that and select what you want to transfer. With your iphone on the same LAN as your PC or Mac, you get an IP address at the top of the screen of your iphone. Like 192.168.1.xxx. Launch your favorite browser, like Chrome or Firefox and type that IP address in and you will see the files listed after a few seconds to connect. Then just download them with the down arrow icon. I just checked and all the metadata from my iphone 6+ is still there ( right click on the image after download and select properties/ details. There is also a button to upload files to your iphone from your PC too but be careful that the files are iOS compatible.

I used the free app called "Transfer IT ! " You will get some requests to download stupid games but just X past those on the iphone.

BTW this also works to transfer video and photos and pdf files from iphone to ipad and back. Just make sure both devices are on the same LAN

 

[TheForce]

Klang- IIRC, icloud re-encodes the files for storage in a more compressed format. I tried it once and besides being very slow, it added lots of noise to my high res photos and videos.

 

[stardust3]

If you have a gmail/google account you can automatically backup your photos. It keeps date and time info along with location and device info.

It is an excellent way to safeguard photos. You can also view your photos from any device. Picture quality may not be studio quality but is excellent imo.

Here is a copy and paste directly from my google cloud.

 

[klang]

Klang- IIRC, icloud re-encodes the files for storage in a more compressed format. I tried it once and besides being very slow, it added lots of noise to my high res photos and videos.

Never tried it myself, all my photos go straight to my iMac. Just seemed likely to me the date and location data would remain with the photos going from iPhone to iCloud to iCloud app on a pc.

As stardust3 suggests, gmail storage is another option.

 

[TheForce]

I found a good way to know if your images are being re-encoded, adding some level of degradation, is if when you upload to one of these cloud services, it take a while for them to become available. Another is what Navy hinted at is when the meta data gets deleted. I have tested icloud, Google drive, and Dropbox and do use them for when they are an advantage but all of these monkey with your files for compression. In most cases people don't care as convenience for cross device access is all they are interested in. But Navy wanted more than just convenience as do I most of the time. Besides, I wanted a local solution to move large video and many large image files from my iphone 6+ to my PC video work station and the iCloud > PC itunes method was painfully slow. Using the wifi on a local LAN was the fastest by a factor of couple hundred times and there was no loss.

 

[TheForce]

Never tried it myself, all my photos go straight to my iMac. Just seemed likely to me the date and location data would remain with the photos going from iPhone to iCloud to iCloud app on a pc.

As stardust3 suggests, gmail storage is another option.

Question for you- When you connect your iphone to your mac, do you use the Lightning cable to USB or do you just use the wifi, or icloud method? I haven't tried it here but my wife's iphone is damn near full of photos and she can't bear to delete them. So I was trying to figure out which way would be the simplest for her to move the older ones to her imac and free up some space on her iphone SE. I don't think compression losses would matter in her case. Ease and convenience is more important.

 

[klang]

Question for you- When you connect your iphone to your mac, do you use the Lightning cable to USB or do you just use the wifi, or icloud method? I haven't tried it here but my wife's iphone is damn near full of photos and she can't bear to delete them. So I was trying to figure out which way would be the simplest for her to move the older ones to her imac and free up some space on her iphone SE. I don't think compression losses would matter in her case. Ease and convenience is more important.

I use the lightning cable. You can choose what to sync through iTunes. Wifi syncing should work the same.

 

[stardust3]

I found a good way to know if your images are being re-encoded, adding some level of degradation, is if when you upload to one of these cloud services, it take a while for them to become available. Another is what Navy hinted at is when the meta data gets deleted. I have tested icloud, Google drive, and Dropbox and do use them for when they are an advantage but all of these monkey with your files for compression. In most cases people don't care as convenience for cross device access is all they are interested in. But Navy wanted more than just convenience as do I most of the time. Besides, I wanted a local solution to move large video and many large image files from my iphone 6+ to my PC video work station and the iCloud > PC itunes method was painfully slow. Using the wifi on a local LAN was the fastest by a factor of couple hundred times and there was no loss.

There is no rule that says a person can't do both, cloud backup and directly to a computer. Personally I do both, original to a pc and the backup to the cloud. Yes google does monkey with your file as you suggest. However with free unlimited cloud storage they can monkey with the file all they want as long as they provide a high quality image which they do. Btw the google does offer an option to keep the original file, it will however start tallying up. They offer 15 gigs as part a of a free account, for $99.99 a year you can get 1tb of cloud storage.

Using 3 different devices to capture media with makes the cloud convenient for viewing. Even though everything eventually goes to a pc and the pc gets backed up occasionally, nothing ever gets looked at from the pc viewer. Also if a fire, flood or other disaster ever happens a person is not sol. When it comes to protecting your heirlooms which I consider pics and video, there can never be enough backups.

 

[TheForce]

I use Dropbox for my common files I want to update on any device and have available. Only need the free version last I checked was 2GB. I should switch to Google Drive which I installed but haven't switched to it. The dropbox files are spreadsheets of my budgets and some pdf files of my contacts. The only cloud I pay for is icloud 50GB for $.99 a month. We have the iphones and ipads backups on that.

At home my critical PC's backups of my C drives use clone matching disks that I update usually once a month or so. In the past when a C drive goes, I am usually in need of a fast replacement of my applications and OS. Swapping the drives with the clones is the fastest recovery. I've lost a couple of data drives over the years but these have all been my digitized movies, so I keep a twin of those drives. Frankly, it seems to be a waste of money because the drives never went bad, just the data on them and I have a tool called "file scavenger" that can recover the files when the drive reports needing formatting. It's time consuming, though. 2TB of movies takes about 12 - 18 hours to rebuild to a new drive.