Squinting, with clenched teeth, one shoulder raised to protect myself.. I finally hit the button to get all the pix & vids off my iPhone and onto an external HD. I didn’t foresee what happened. It wasn’t Image Capture after all, which will bring images into the computer from a camera.. it did not see my iPhone. And btw, I never sync photos to or from the phone. I don’t need all my photos everywhere, not on my iPad either.
What imported 2,000+ .jpg, .png and .mov files was the Import function of HP Photosmart Studio. I connected the phone and the ex HD to my MacBook Pro and the printer software saw the iPhone. I directed the Import to the ex HD and walked away as it worked for a long time.
Being a learning experience, I didn’t know until afterwards that the iPhone files would also be recorded in All Images on the Mac HD: again, not what I wanted. That particular folder seems to be home to every “picture” that your computer has ever used.. like files called “brown” or “left corner” and every icon you never noticed as your innocently browse your way through life or download on purpose. I had downloaded a trial version of Word and it put every thing in the world on my computer. I didn’t buy it at the end of thirty days but there remained all the stuffings of Word on my HD. That’s ONE example.
What’s on YOUR hard drive? Sit back and look at your computer. Just about everything you see is a picture; how much of it is recorded in All Pictures? No wonder I had 11,000 and more. Yes, a lot of my own JPGs, TIFs and NEFs are there. When the importing was finished, the 11,000 had also duplicated itself to 22,000 on the external HD. Don’t ask me why. I painstakingly cleared the duplication. Do I need to sit with an expert before I do something like that again? YUP.
There’s a Mac clean-up software that I see advertised sometimes – that might be a place to start too. Funny how you can happily use a machine for so long and know so little about what it’s doing.
With a myriad of other things going on in life it’ll be another day before I send any of the now safe-and-sound movies to YouTube (or CD) that I moved from the iPhone, since they were “too big to email,” hence useless stored there. And I’m much more cautious about what pictures or movies I make with the iPhone now that I know the limitations for getting them OUT of the phone.
What’s in – your ROOM! Do you have a bazillion CD’s from years gone by with photos you’ll use one day? What are we gonna do with all this (Stuff). I need help – but not with addition. Certainly not multiplication.
Cathryn
“You know one day it’s all gonna burn to the ground.” Clay Crosse





