How do I save all the photos of my dying dog?

March 7, 2023 3:01 AM

My dog doesn’t have long to live. I have 27,000+ photos on an iPhone XR, most of which are of her. I *think* they’re backed up to the cloud, but what’s a foolproof way be sure I don’t lose them?

I have tried to Google but I’m not thinking straight and I’m scared I’m going to get it wrong. I have a new Microsoft Surface 4 laptop with nothing stored on it yet, so should be plenty of storage on the hard drive.

I need to get these photos safely saved in 2 places (cloud + hard drive?) so I can delete them off my phone. I can’t have them sitting on my phone once she’s gone, it’ll break my heart.

If someone could ‘explain like I’m five’, I’d be so grateful.

Thanks in advance.

posted by Salamander to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: Hello;
I found this online,perhaps it will be of some help?


How do I get Photos off my iPhone XR?

Transfer Photos & Videos
With the device powered on, insert the Lightning end of the Lightning-to-USB cable into the port at the base of the device. Insert the USB end of the Lightning-to-USB cable into an open USB port on the computer.
On the computer, open. Photos.
On the iPhone, select Trust.
posted by LOOKING at 4:33 AM on March 7, 2023

Best answer: I'm sorry to hear about your dog. Please give her some scratches from an internet stranger.

Here's how I would recommend downloading the photos to your Surface:

If the photos are stored in iCloud (try this first):

If the photos are stored in the cloud, then it's probably best not to involve your phone at all. Instead, install iCloud for Windows on the Surface. This will allow you to access the cloud copies of your photos from the laptop; in particular, you can download the photos directly to the Surface without involving your phone at all.

If you don't see some or all of the photos when you log on to iCloud through Windows, don't panic! That just means that they're stored on your phone rather than in iCloud. Proceed to the next section to retrieve them.

If the photos are stored on your phone:

If some or all of your photos are not in iCloud, you'll need to connect your phone to the Surface to download them. Here are Apple's instructions on how to do this, and here are Microsoft's. Basically, you need to:

1. Ensure that you have iTunes up to date on the Surface (my guess is that there are certain drivers that are included with it.)
2. Physically connect the phone to your Surface with a USB cable. Accept the prompts for the devices to "trust" each other.
3. Open the Photos app on the Surface, select Import > From a Connected Device, and follow the instructions.

This latter method will only work for photos that are stored "locally" on your phone. Given that you're talking about 27k photos, I suspect that not all of them are actually stored on your phone, and that most/all of them are in the cloud instead, which is why I recommend doing the cloud download first and then seeing if any gaps need to be filled in.
posted by Johnny Assay at 5:09 AM on March 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

Best answer: Also, be aware that this will take time. A photo taken on my iPhone is about 4MB, so this could be about 100GB of files. A joke at work where I deal a lot with photographers and videographers is that it's faster to drive across town and hand-deliver an external drive than to try to move that many files over the Internet.

Try to be patient -- you will likely run into issues like things timing out, or you going to get coffee and your computer going to sleep and you having to redo some of this, and so on. This is worth doing but it's a pretty big project. It's going to take a bit of perseverance.

You may also want to get an external drive to hold these photos once you're confident that you have them safely on the Surface. My work Surface came with a 256 GB drive, but with Windows and fairly large programs (Adobe Suite, Office, some other things) I have only 30GB of free space presently. Since your machine is new it will likely be fine, but Windows is greedy and software is huge, so you will want to have a secure secondary location for these photos at some point.

But you can do this! The steps above are great. My #1 mistake is always forgetting to have my phone "live" when I plug it in, because the "Trust" thing only works if the phone is awake when I plug it to the computer. Take your time, take it step by step, and it'll be fine. You got this.
posted by Shepherd at 9:48 AM on March 7, 2023 [3 favorites]