Get your photos on to your Mac
Explore a range of techniques to transfer photos and video clips from camera to computer
Thanks to your ever-present iPhone you can capture a photograph wherever and whenever you like. However, this creates the problem of managing an ever-growing collection of clips and images. On these two pages, we cover a range of methods to help you store your shots safely.
Sync your assets
The easiest way to get photos off your iPhone and safely on to your Mac is to use iCloud Photos. Do this across all your devices and, as soon as you’re in range of a Wi-Fi connection, your latest iPhone stills and clips will automatically upload to iCloud Photos. Then as soon as you fire your Mac up at home, these assets will download into its Photos app so that you can edit and share them from the comfort of your desktop. Your photos will also automatically appear in the Photos app on other Wi-Fi connected gadgets such as your iPad, so you can relax in the knowledge that all your photos
With iCloud Photos, you can edit and share your iPhone images from your Mac
are in sync on every device. You can even view and organise your synced photos and videos by logging into iCloud Photos using any computer’s web browser.
Here’s how to set up your iPhone to automatically share to the iCloud. You’ll need an iCloud account of course and that comes with a free 5GB of storage. However a prolific photographer will soon need more storage space so it’s well worth upgrading to iCloud+. For £0.79 per month you get 50GB of storage. Professional photographers shooting in Apple ProRAW (or capturing 4K video clips) might need to fork out a monthly £6.99 for a whopping 2TB of iCloud storage space.
To set up iCloud syncing, go to your iPhone’s Settings, tap on the Photos app’s icon and then scroll down and tap to toggle iCloud Photos on. Your snaps will then automatically be uploaded to your iCloud account (and synced with your other devices). To save storage space on your iPhone, turn on Optimise iPhone Storage in Settings > Photos. When the iPhone becomes low on storage space, full-sized shots will be replaced by low-res versions. The original high-res versions will be stored safely in iCloud Photos, so if you then need to edit and/ or share a shot on your iPhone or Mac, the full-sized version will be downloaded to the device.
Uploading clips and stills to iCloud could devour your iPhone’s mobile data allowance. Go to Photos > Settings and tap Mobile Data. Turn Mobile Data off. Now your iPhone will only upload shots to iCloud when it’s connected to Wi-Fi.
To make sure that your Mac is also talking to iCloud, launch the macOS Photos app. Go to Photos > Preferences. Click the iCloud icon. Tick the iCloud Photos box to keep your Mac and iOS devices’ Photos apps in sync.
As with the iPhone, you can save valuable storage space on your Mac by clicking on the Optimise Mac Storage option. This stores low-res images on your Mac. The full-size photo or video will automatically download when you click the Edit button in the Photos app.