Transfer Photos from iPhone to PC using iFunBox Software

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I transfer my photos from my iPhone to my computer using iFunbox. This is part of a series of videos on organizing and accessing digital photos.

I love many things about the iPhone and iPad, but one thing that makes me a little crazy is that in Apple's quest for ease and simplification, they have taken away a lot of the control that you have as a user.  One particular pet peeve of mine is that you don't have direct access to the file structure of your iPhone.  

The reason I originally discovered the free iFunBox program is that I had a bunch of phantom photos on my iPhone. In other words, my phone said that I had 3GB of photos even after I had cleaned off the phone and only had about 10 photos showing in my Camera Roll.  I downloaded iFunBox on my PC and hooked up my phone to get access to my iPhone's full file structure and was able to find and delete all of those phantom photos that were hidden in inaccessible file folders. 

As I said in a previous video, I have not had good success with Apple's iPhoto for PC software as a way of transferring photos from my iPhone and iPad to my PC.  I find it to be perfectly maddening. It works sometimes and then only partially and also messes up the date stamp within the photo's metadata.  I'm also not a big fan of iTunes -- I'm wary of bloated software that takes too much control and doesn't give you much back.  

Since I only do a big transfer 4 times a year, I'm willing to jump through some hoops to get it to work right, but I do not have patience for unreliable options.  So, here is the process that I use.  For the sake of this explainer, I'm just going to use an iPhone, but this will work for both an iPhone or iPad.  

1 - Prune Camera Roll on iPhone - First go through your iPhone Camera Roll and delete everything that you do not want to bring over to your PC. 

2 - Delete everything in Recently Deleted Folder - This is an important step.  All of those photos and videos that you just deleted are now in a Recently Deleted folder on your iPhone.  You can find this folder by going into Photos - Albums - Recently Deleted.  The iPhone keeps the photos you deleted just in case for 30 days, at which point they are deleted for good.  The problem is that although they are marked for deletion, they are stored physically in the same place as all of the photos that you want to keep.  So get rid of them by hitting Select and then hitting Delete All.

3 - Connect with USB and launch iFunBox

4 - Access File Structure - Okay -- now that you are in iFunBox, choose My Device and then go down to Toolbox.  Now select User File System.  Now we are getting somewhere.  Your pictures are stored in the DCIM folder, so click on that and the photos from your Camera Roll should be in the couple of last folders.  In my case, 112APPLE and 113APPLE.  You may want to check to see if there are photos in any of the other folders -- that's where all my phantom photos were hiding.  I find it satisfying that the number of photos in my Camera Roll matches up with the number of photos within these folders.  This is not a given for any of the other methods I've tried.

5 - Copy to PC - Now select the photos that you want to transfer to your PC.  You can select all of them by clicking on the first photo and, while holding down the Shift, button clicking on the last.  Otherwise, select individual photos by clicking while holding down the Control button.  Once you've got them all selected, click on Copy to PC, choose a folder and hit Save.  

6 - Organize on your PC - Now that the photos are transferred, you can organize them on your PC anyway you want.  See my video series on Organizing Digital photos - Part 2 to see how I organize mine.  I also wipe them from my iPhone after I transfer them since I also save them to Google Photos through Picasa during this process and then can easily access them from the cloud.

If you don't have a problem with hidden files, you may be able to just use the normal Windows File Explorer window for this whole process.  For my iPhone, once I connect it to my PC using a USB cord, I can bring up Windows File Explorer and there is my iPhone.  The only folder it gives you access to is the DCIM folder and it only lets you see those last 2 folders.  There are a some non-photo files within the folders, so make sure you identify those while transferring them.  

Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!