Copy photos from iPhone to PC

My daughter and I each got an iPhone 6s earlier this year. I love that she will be able to take hundreds, if not thousands of good-quality pictures of her jr high and highschool experience.

As our phones filled with photos and I felt the need to make a backup I made a frustrating discovery. My Windows 8.1 laptop is having difficulty recognizing our new iPhones.

I plugged our iPhones in to my computer’s USB ports. Drivers were installed and the phone asked if it can trust the PC. I told it yes. But for some reason the phone would not show up in my computer’s list of drives and devices.

For my own iPhone I installed DropBox. I already had their pro subscription for work purposes (about $100 per year.) On my iPhone, DropBox is set to automatically sync all pictures to my other devices.

I did try Apple products, such as iTunes. But I already have so much running on my PC. The extra program was causing unneccessary stress, which is why I switched to DropBox before even getting a good feel for what Apple provides.

Now for my daughter’s photos … She has too many to transfer via a free DropBox account. And I can’t see myself giving her full access to my DropBox account or paying for her to have her own. I *had* to find a way to simply copy/paste the files to my computer.

Multiple articles online simply said to plug in the phone and the photo app on your computer should launch or the iPhone should be listed in your devices. Neither of these were the case for me.

Eventually, I went to my computer’s Control Panel and found my daughter’s iphone and driver listed under “Unspecified”. Right-clicking on the “Apple iPhone” icon gave an option to “Browse Files” on her phone.

Browsing the files of her phone only gave me access to her photos and videos. But that was what I wanted to back up, so I am happy for now.