voodoo47 on 29/6/2025 at 16:31
well, here we are, it's finally arrived, my first full fledged old man fights new technology, fails, asks younger people for help moment.
so, I have and older ipad here, it's full of photos and videos, I want to get them to a normal computer, third hour in, no real progress. what would be the least genocidal thoughts inducing way to go about it? my idea of just connecting the thing with an usb cord and simply copying the files turned out to be incredibly naive, I have no idea where the files are and the ipad doesn't know either, attempted to upload to gdrive but only a random fraction of the files actually land there, trying to redo the upload seems to just create multiple copies of that random chunk.. there is no logic, no sanity, no order to things, just madness, chaos and suffering.
I guess I could just upload to gdrive by small chunks (lets say 10 videos a time) and then double check whether everything got through each time (and upload any missing bit manually), but man, it's 1000+ files..
so, any ideas? thanks.
Al_B on 30/6/2025 at 17:02
I am by no means an expert on ipads (quite the opposite!) but I presume there's a reason it can't be synced with iCloud and then retrieved from there?
voodoo47 on 30/6/2025 at 19:51
I'll check, but I'm guessing it will try to force me to install some bs software on the computer. I'd rather upload a thousand files by 10 piece chunks than that.
Al_B on 30/6/2025 at 21:36
No - you can just use the web interface, no installation required ((
https://www.icloud.com/photos/)). If you can log on with the same account as the iPad then they may already be there.
voodoo47 on 1/7/2025 at 12:15
sounds reasonable, will try - thanks.
heywood on 3/7/2025 at 16:46
I connect my iPhone to a Windows PC by USB, find the phone in Windows Explorer, right click on it and select "Import pictures and videos". The import wizard is quirky and not very tolerant of I/O errors, but it gets the job done. And it allows me to automatically rename the files on import. I use that to include the date taken in the file name. That makes it easier to organize them later.
I take a lot of pics and vids on trips and don't like to push all those GB through the cloud to get them onto my NAS at home.
EDIT: I forgot to mention there is an iOS Camera app setting you may be interested in. If you go to Settings->Camera->Formats and set the Camera Capture option to Most Compatible, then when you use the Windows import wizard, the phone converts the files from Apple formats to JPEG and H.264, which saves you from needing to do a batch conversion after the files are transferred to your computer.
