Android to PC

Manually Copy/Paste Images in Explorer

If you prefer to have as much control as possible over how your photos are organized, you’ll want to import everything manually.

To do this, once again make sure your phone is in the correct mode and ready to transfer images. From there, open Windows Explorer and head to “This PC.”

Your phone should be listed as a device. Depending on how the USB transfer option is set, the icon may look like a camera, a portable media player, or maybe even another drive. The icon isn’t that important, though—just pay attention to the name.

Once you open the device, you’ll see a drive named “Phone.” Open this drive.

Select all the images you’d like to transfer. Just as in other Windows folders, you can select a range of photos by clicking the first photo you want, and then Shift+clicking the last photo in the range. Or, you can select multiple photos one at a time by Ctrl+clicking them.

After selecting your photos, right click on one of the selected images, and then select the “Copy” command (you can also just hit Ctrl+C). If you’d like to move photos instead of copying them (which removes them from the phone), use the “Cut” command instead.

Navigate to the folder where you’d like the pictures to go, right click any empty space in the folder, and then choose the “Paste” command (or hit Ctrl+V).

After a few seconds (or minutes, depending on how many images you’re transferring) all the pictures should be in their new home. And of course, if you prefer dragging and dropping rather than copying and pasting, you could can also open a couple of File Explorer windows and just drag the photos the way you would any other files.