Saving Pictures

Well, this is a very common occurrence! -“I just tried attaching my smartphone to my laptop to save some pictures and got nowhere!” Or, “I hooked up my smartphone to my computer, but I did not see all my pictures!” Or, “Where on my smartphone are my pictures?”

Do any of these sound familiar? If so, then here are some steps you can take to help resolve the issue and minimize your frustration when storing pictures from a smartphone, tablet, or digital camera on to a Windows based computer.

Getting Started

To get started, you need to understand how pictures are saved on a smartphone and how they are saved elsewhere. (The word "elsewhere" is very important here.) To begin with, there are two basic sources of smartphones: iPhones (made only by Apple) and Android based phones (which are made by all other manufacturers). A general statement for all types of phones, tablets and digital cameras, is that the folder name used to store pictures on the phone is always "DCIM", which stands for Digital Camera Images. Each smartphone, tablet, or digital camera create sub-folders with their own unique names so the sub-folder names will vary with each device – whether smartphone, tablet, or digital camera.

iPhone picture storage and setup

With the Apple products, there is a possible link from the iPhone to your private iCloud account, which is a storage location on the internet provided by Apple. [Apple makes all the ‘i’ products.] When you first get your iPhone, the pictures you take are initially stored on the actual phone, as one would expect. Over time, however, the pictures you take may be stored in your own iCloud storage account on the internet, and these pictures are NOT on your phone at all. You can only see the pictures that are in your online iCloud account (that do appear on your phone) if you have internet access, so if you are in a location without the internet, you will not see these pictures. Once enough the pictures are stored on/in your online iCloud account, you will be asked by Apple if you want to upgrade your account to increase your storage. Users currently get 5 GB free, but can upgrade, starting out at about $.99 or $1 each month. This charge may only apply to the iPhone. As you use more iCloud storage space, the charge increases as certain space thresholds are met.

For those who may wish to retrieve pictures from the iCloud and downloading them to a computer, this is a somewhat involved task. Most iPhone users think that all of their pictures are on the phone because they see them on the phone, but this is often not the real case. At some point, the pictures taken with your iPhone may actually be migrated and stored into your iCloud account online, and you see them on your iPhone only because you have an internet connection. So, if your intent and desire is to save your pictures onto a computer, or onto another storage device, such as a thumb/flash drive or an external USB hard disk drive (HDD), then you may have to download your pictures from the iCloud as well as the pictures that are actually on your iPhone itself.

Accessing the iCloud and viewing pictures

1. The first step is to go to your iCloud account. Everyone with an iPhone or iPad will have one, although it may not be populated with pictures. Use any browser to access www.icloud.com. Once you are at the website, it will ask you for your Apple ID and Password. These are your Apple account’s user ID and Password, and are unique for each person (each account). Your iCloud account will know your iPhone number, and will then send you a text message with a code after you have tried to login to your iCloud account. This code will then be asked on the computer while you are entering your iCloud account, so type this code in online on the computer. (This process is called two-factor authentication and gives an extra layer of security.) But, if you have not activated your iCloud account yet, there will be no message and no code will come to your phone.

2. If done correctly, you will now have permission to enter your very own iCloud account. A window appears with numerous choices, and since we are only discussing pictures at this point, click on the icon "Pictures". A new window opens up and it will show you all your pictures you thought were on your phone, but are actually only in this iCloud storage. You can easily verify this by going to one of these pictures on your iPhone, which you will also see on your computer in this iCloud account window. Pick a picture that you do not wish to save and delete it from your iCloud account online, and it will disappear from your phone in a few seconds as well!

3. Apple breaks up your pictures in what they call ‘Albums’, which is probably no more than what pictures you took at roughly the same time, and thus, grouped together by the iPhone/iCloud system. Since you cannot see any folders or filenames when online in Pictures in your iCloud account, this is the only organization you will see. The pictures are displayed across the browser window horizontally with no visible file names. When logged into your iCloud account, you can now use standard Windows highlighting, such as “cntrl” click and “shift” click to highlight and select your pictures.

Deleting & downloading pictures from the iCloud and your iPhone

If you want to save your pictures onto a computer, or onto another storage device such as a thumb/flash drive or an external USB hard disk drive (HDD), then you may have to download your pictures from the iCloud as well as from your iPhone itself.

You have three (3) options:

1. Select the pictures you do not want to keep nor save onto your computer and delete them by clicking on the trash can icon up towards the top of the browser iCloud window.

2. Select the pictures you want to download, and then download them by selecting the cloud icon with the down arrow that runs through it. If you do this piecemeal (download only a few at a time), then prearrange the folder you wish to store them into on your computer by locating or creating the folders on your computer ahead of time.

3. Simply select all your pictures from the iCloud, and download them all into on big folder on the computer, and once you have verified that they are all downloaded, you can then delete any or all of the pictures from the iCloud account.

NOTE 1: This current version of the Apple software on the PC that is used to manage your iCloud pictures will insert all of the pictures you have selected into one ZIP file when more than one picture is selected to downloaded. So, to open this ZIP file once it has downloaded, double click on it, and it will generate a sub-folder of the same name, without the 'ZIP' extension. Then enter that sub-folder, again,by double clicking, and you will see a list of all the pictures that are encased inside that ZIP file. To retrieve them, which is a must to get the actual pictures so you can view them, you must highlight all the files shown there (normally with Explorer), and right click and "Copy" them all. Then you have to go up two levels to where the original ZIP file is,. To go up two levels, click on the left pointing arrow (towards the top left hand side) twice.

Now "Paste" (right click in the white space and select "Paste") the pictures you just copied. You should be able to see all the pictures now, and can now verify that they have indeed been downloaded and saved. The pictures are listed in the 'Details' viewing mode (a filename list only), and you would need to click on 'View' up at the top and select one of the picture modes, such as 'Small', or 'Medium", or "Large, or 'Very large icons'.

If you are downloading another set of pictures from your iCloud account into the same folder on your computer, then you should rename the ZIP file name that comes up (it will be the same as the name used just before), and perhaps add another character at the end of the filename. A suggestion is to just add a ‘1’ the first time, and a ‘2’ the next ZIP for the same target folder for the next download, and a '3' for the next one, and so on. If you do not do this, then each subsequent download will overlay the previous ZIP file, and you will not be able to retrieve the pictures from that previous ZIP file again, if ever needed. Renaming the ZIP file is just cautious practice.

NOTE 2: If you are downloading only two or maybe three pictures at a time to insert into a specific folder on your computer, you may not want to go through all the work of managing the resultant Zip file. To reduce this work with the Zip file, you might consider downloading just one, two, or three files, all separately, and there will be no Zip file with these downloads. When downloading only one picture at a time, the Zip file is not created, and the picture will appear in the target computer folder directly.

NOTE 3: It is wise to always confirm that your download happened properly and that you have all the pictures on your computer before deleting them from your online iCloud account. You should do this for every download. I recommend having two Explorer windows open at the same time, side by side, with the left one being the browser iCloud window and the right one being an Explorer window, open at the target folder.

Stop sending pictures to the iCloud

If you would like to stop having your pictures sent up to iCloud, you must remove (or delete) all the pictures you have in the iCloud account first, then go to your iPhone’s Setup to turn off sending any more up to the iCloud. Of course, if you wish to save and retain these iCloud based pictures, you would have to download them first before deleting them. Next, you need to turn off sending any further pictures to the iCloud, which is a multi-step process on your iPhone . If you do not do both of these steps, pictures will either continue to be sent to your iCloud account (in the case you did not turn off sending pictures to the iCloud), or you will not be able to access your pictures that reside in the iCloud account online .

Now that you have removed pictures from the iCloud account, you may still wish to see some of these on you iPhone still. Remember, deleting them from your iCloud account deletes them from you viewing them on your iPhone as well. They are just completely gone! So, how do you get pictures back onto your iPhone? Well, the design of the iPhone does not let you store any files onto it directly, as you can do with all android phones and other external storage devices. With the android phone, you simply plug it into your computer, and download picture (file) using the File Manager (Explorer) the files you want on your phone.

Adding pictures back to your iPhone without iCloud

There are two ways to get your pictures back onto your iPhone if you want the ability to show others (or yourself) your pictures. These methods are: (1) Email them to yourself from your computer, or (2) email them to a friend and have them text message the pictures back to you. These pictures will remain on your actual iPhone and not be sent to the iCloud since they came from another source.

Removing pictures on the iPhone that are not in iCloud

To get pictures off your iPhone that are not in the iCloud account, you will need to answer the question "Trust this device" with a yes when you connect your iPhone to the computer. Once you have given that authorization (Trusted Device), then you should be able to see the iPhone as a listed item in the ‘My Computer’ (Windows 7) or "This PC" (Windows 10) window. The name of your iPhone or iPad should be listed, and once you go into that device, there should be a folder called "DCIM". Once you see DCIM, you can save these pictures to your computer’s hard drive. Unfortunately, you cannot copy pictures or other files from your PC to your iPhone, which is why it is not mentioned above as one of the methods for adding pictures to your iPhone.

Sometimes, the Windows system will not see the iPhone at all, even after the "Trust" question has been answered. There are several reasons why this can happen, and two of these are: (1) there are no pictures actually on the iPhone, or (2) you have to turn off access to the iCloud account before the Windows system will see the iPhone, and then see all the pictures that are actually on the iPhone.

Android phone setup, storage, and access

Android phones work essentially like digital cameras do when connecting them to a Windows based computer. You can simply connect your smart Android phone to the computer via the power cable, minus the power outlet junction, which then becomes a USB cable.

1. First, tell the smart phone setup to allow your connection to a computer (this varies by phone), and once the connection has been authorized, you will see all the folders that are on the smart phone, including the picture folder. The connection to the computer from the phone is via a USB cable, preferably the one that came with the phone, minus the A/C adapter portion.

2. In Explorer, locate the icon of your phone, and open it.

3. The picture folder is named "DCIM" and it should appear once the connection has been authorized in your phone’s setup, and you see the drive letter or icon for the smart phone on the computer. With some phones, sometimes the "DCIM" folder is a sub folder, such as with LG phones, where the first level folder name is "Internal Storage", and the "DCIM" folder is inside/below the "Internal Storage" folder..

4. Then, you can read or store into this folder as well as any of its sub-folders. With a direct connection from the computer to your smart phone,then you can put pictures (actually, any file) onto your Android smart phone, from any computer, and be able to retrieve them. I have copied MS Word files to my smart phone!