how do you download your iphone photos onto your computer and how do you organize them

@scrappyjedi - I am almost there! I have the dropbox app installed on my MAC and I have uploaded my camera roll from my iPhone to dropbox. It has synced and put the pictures in my dropbox folder on my desktop. Now I just need to import the pictures into LR. Should I move the pictures to the Watched Folder? or should I make the "Watched Folder" be the Dropbox folder(on the desktop)? I am certain I am overthinking this and making matters more difficult than necessary. I really appreciate you guiding me through each and every step of this process. Hopefully others are learning along side of me!

 

Yay!! You are almost there!!

The easiest thing is just to make the Camera Uploads folder (inside your Dropbox folder) Lightroom's watched folder. The only trick is that folder has to be empty when you first set it up with Lightroom, so you'll need to copy the photos that have already uploaded to a temporary location, set up Lightroom with the folder, and then copy the photos back to it.

Another cool thing- ANY photo you drop into this folder will get sucked into Lightroom. Want to download pics from family on Facebook and add them to Lightroom? Have some photos that were emailed to you that you want in your catalog? Throw them in your Camera Uploads! It makes things so much easier!

 

Cool tip - thanks for sharing!

 

I upload all of my phone photos to Dropbox, but I don't archive them from there; it's just a safety net. All of my photos end up on my phone at some point or another, plus Dropbox renames all the files, and I prefer to import my photos manually into Lightroom using SD cards. It also prevents me from saving all those pictures that I take with my phone for one reason or another but don't want to keep.

I have the paid Dropbox Pro ($99 per year, paid annually), which automatically downloads my phone photos into the cloud. The free Dropbox has changed so that if you don't have a desktop version of Dropbox tied to your account, it won't automatically download photos from your iOS camera roll.

I pay for iCloud ($0.99 each month for 50GB) because it is how I have decided to manage my phone photos. I take photos with my phone, edit them on my iPad, download the "keepers" to an SD card and delete all copies at once from my PC. It is less complicated than it sounds and, most importantly, fits my workflow well. LOL

My actual back up is an external networked hard drive that my husband set up to save copies of his CDs and DVDs. He made a partition in it just for me. Eventually, I would also like to save them to SmugMug, but my Lightroom skills aren't quite there yet.

 

Like to save the photos from my iphone to pc, and I set up folders to classify them by places and person. It is convenient for me to transfer photos from iphone to pc, and also other files like music and videos.

 

@bjc I used to use both Dropbox (though my account got hacked, but they were able to restore) and CrashPlan (they're just awful and lost 2TB of my data). For cloud storage, I'm currently using Amazon Prime Photos. They offer unlimited photo storage for free with my Prime account. I have the app on my iPhone, and I open it to sync my pics.

I can keep my pics in either a family vault, a private file or both. I can also invite 5 users to share their photos with my Family Vault (great for getting pics from my children & hubby). It has a fantastic tagging system that's automatic (no spending hours tagging pics until I want to add more tags). When I was doing my Converse page, I was able to type in "shoes," and it pulled up all pics with shoes in them. It also tags people, locations, etc. automatically. My Dropbox account could never do that.

My only complaint is that I wish there was a more efficient way to download them. You can get them singularly or as a zip file for multiple pics, which is what I do when I'm scrapping. I also still do manual transfers to all of my external hard drives because I'm paranoid about backups and don't trust any one storage solution.

 

This is what I do too. But then do you delete pics from your iphone? I am bad about deleting my iPhone pictures since I have a ton of storage. This becomes problematic when I delete from LR and then when I plug my phone in again it will want to upload the pictures that I already deleted from LR.

Anyone else’s have this issue? What is your work around? Thanks in advance.
Kelly

 

Yes, I do delete the pictures from my phone after importing them via Lightroom. It's just part of my routine every time I import photos.

 

Because mine go through Dropbox first, I don't have the reimport problem with my phone.
I don't have that problem with my SD card because I drag and drop my photos into a folder, and tell LR to sync instead of import.

I would guess you could change the import date, and only import after the last date you did it?

 

So @michelepixels do you keep pictures on your phone? If so, I am guessing you make albums and export them to your phone?

 

As I said, I delete them from my phone after I import them to Lightroom. And no, I don't make albums to export to my phone. Are you talking about the phone Lightroom app? I don't use it. I'm confused. Maybe I jumped into the middle of the conversation without fully understanding what was being discussed at the beginning. If I have time later, I'll go back and re-read this thread.

To clarify my answer to this last question at least, no I do not keep photos on my phone. Even after I upgraded my phone and have plenty of space, I didn't see any point in keeping photos on my phone. I treat it like my DSLR. It's just for making photos, not storing them.

 

I agree with @jenn mccabe - how much iCloud storage do you need to have to put all you pics there? Are you then deleting them from your iCloud? Or are you using iCloud as another form of back-up?

 

I have tried this with my Android but keep getting a message that my computer doesn't recognize my phone and I don't know how to fix this. My dd did something to my phone that as soon as I take a photo it immediately shows up on my computer-----that is until my last batch of photos I took Tuesday. I took over 50 photos and nothing showed up on my computer. Have no idea why?????????

 

Also, I have Dropbox but had no idea you could put your photos from your phone to Dropbox. Are there instructions somewhere???

 

@NancyP

https://www.dropbox.com/help/photos-videos/camera-uploads-overview

I have mine set to upload automatically as long as I am on wi-fi so that I don't use any data.

 

Check with your dd first. It's possible she set up Dropbox for you. That's how mine works - and I have way too much data, so I let mine upload right away. Sometimes, when Dropbox stops working, either the folder is full, or it updated and I need to give it permissions again.