iPhone file management, in-phone or on a Windows computer

August 30, 2016 11:48 AM

I need to manage my iPhone files, as I recently ran out of space when trying to take some more photos. I have all my photos backed up, but iTunes on my Windows laptop doesn't (appear) to help me, as I can only manage audio, podcasts and video, and deleting photos on my iPhone is time consuming. Bonus points: all-around photo managing/ tagging software that can also manage iPhone photos.

I've been manually backed up photos by copying them off the iPhone when it loads as a read-only photo archive. I found I can't simply delete a whole folder, which would have been my preferred option.

Google's Photo app and online storage sounded good (previous question), but it looks like "unlimited storage" is only available for reduced resolution images, and I'd want to back up full resolution photos.

I'm running Windows Vista and Windows 7, which seems to limit my options. I've seen some products, but I'd like to hear people's suggestions before installing a bunch of demos to see what's best.

It would be super awesome if there's a program that can manage photos, including content on an iPhone. My photo library is huge and not well organized. For a sense of scale, I have close to 7,000 photos in my camera roll on my iPhone alone, which are backed up on an external HD.

Additional caveats: I don't want to rely on cloud storage for backups, because 1) I want to have everything locally, and 2) I'm not sure all my photos would fit on a reliable storage option. If you have a solution that includes cloud storage, I'd be interested to hear more, but cloud-only solutions are not my preferred solution.

posted by filthy light thief to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

> Most phone cameras are less than 16 megapixels (like iPhone 6 and Samsung Galaxy phones), so most stored photos will essentially look the same if you choose High quality. Source
posted by oxit at 11:52 AM on August 30, 2016

Picasa - it will reimport all of your photos from your phone and delete them if you want it to. It manages albums and tags and I think it has tools for duplication issues.
posted by soelo at 12:06 PM on August 30, 2016

Best answer: I've been manually backed up photos by copying them off the iPhone when it loads as a read-only photo archive. I found I can't simply delete a whole folder, which would have been my preferred option.

I cut and paste the files to my PC and that works to remove them from my iPhone. If that does not work for you, try to find the box in iTunes that says "Manually manage files" or something like that. This should show up when your phone is plugged in and you might need to scroll down on one of the first pages to find it.
posted by soelo at 12:07 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

This only addresses a small part of your problem, but you can mass-select photos on the iPhone by going into "select" mode and dragging diagonally with your finger. Then you can delete the selected photos. So, for example, to delete an entire folder, you could go into a particular folder, drag-select all the photos in the folder and delete them all.
posted by mekily at 12:09 PM on August 30, 2016

Hrm. I use Dropbox to move files between my iPad and my Computer regularly, meaning they are stored locally while also in the cloud. I don't take a lot of photos so I haven't had file space or file management issues, but I do know that Dropbox does allow you to move files around on your desktop and they then disappear from the cloud. I don't know if they then disappear from your mobile device or not.

I don't know if this is a useful answer or not, but Dropbox is very effective at moving photos from a mobile device to a desktop without much hassle. That is all.
posted by hippybear at 8:18 PM on August 30, 2016

Response by poster: I cut and paste the files to my PC and that works to remove them from my iPhone.

I was previously trying to delete entire folders, which didn't work. Now that I re-read your comment, I see that you were managing individual files, not entire folders. So now I'm deleting old photos from within folders, and that seems to work.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:54 PM on November 13, 2016