Why is it so hard to transfer photos from iPhone to Mac?

[Jeeve Stubbs]

Why is it so hard? Because Apple wants you to use iCloud instead, and the company tends to think it knows better than its customers.

 

[ForkHandles]

I’ve also had problems getting my photos from iCloud to an external HD. It’s extremely slow for no discernible reason. The copies take so much longer than a normal file copy would take. It seems faster on iOS but it’s unreasonable to expect me to use iOS for that and I’m not sure if iOS would support my external hard drive

If you have originals downloaded onto your Mac it’s not too bad depending on the option selected.

Transfer Originals - pretty quick

Transfer edited - I have a feeling that Photos files are a bit more complex than a standard jpeg as they contain the edit history. Each file possibly needs processing before export. This is much slower

If the originals don’t exist on the Mac then each has an extra layer of downloading first. Mind numbing slow

Again Mac has a work around for this called Time Machine.

The only problem is is that most photographers grew up storing their collections in a gargantuan file tree with years at the top level, months, event names and they just can’t let go of this cumbersome and antiquated system. So Time Machine won’t suit many