The camera information in Apple Photos in macOS is different than what it is on iOS, and doesn't seem to correspond to anything. For example, for an photo where I have > Telephoto Camera — 77 mm f2.8 on iOS, I get > back triple camera 9mm f/2.8 on macOS. The former makes perfect sense, but I don't recognize the latter. I get this discrepancy regardless of the camera (my current iPhone, my previous iPhone, others' iPhones) used to take the photo. What does the macOS information mean? Why is it different from what's displayed on iOS.

I have a backup of my old iphone stored in icloud, and I would like to get just the photos from it without restoring the entire backup to my new phone, is there any way to do this? The old phone cannot be used as it is dead, and the photos in question are not saved in iCloud photos. I have tried the solutions from https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/297039/accessing-photos-on-iphone-icloud-backup , but they are deprecated and no longer work.

I'm still trying to learn to use a Mac and it's driving me crazy. It seems every time I try to use a photo in an application other than Photos on my MacBook, I see a grayed out "Photos Library.photoslibrary" link that doesn't let me click it to get into the photo library. I have followed the tutorials I've found online that say allow access to the full photo library, to no avail, shown here: All the settings are set as specified in this link: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254792722?sortBy=rank Example: Here's one example above. I tried to import a picture into iMovie, and the link just shows up as unclickable. I can drop pictures from the Photos application into iMovie, but I want to be able to get at them via filename. Please help me understand this mechanism. I just want to browse them by file name. How can I do this?

I have an iPhone 13 (MNGD3LL/A) with iOS 18.5 (22F76), which is the latest general release available to me at time of writing. There are no photos in the **Photos** app on this device (except screenshots taken for this SE question). There are no photos in the **Recently Deleted** album on this device. Despite having only a few screenshots on this device the system shows that **Photos** are using ~26 GB of storage space. Almost 20% of the phone's disk is occupied by data for photos, according to the iOS **iPhone Storage** top-level settings. The individual **Photos** entry under **iPhone Storage** agrees that it's using ~26 GB of storage space. I deleted every photo and video from this iPhone a couple weeks and this space has not been reclaimed. I capture some multimedia every now and then, but delete it almost immediately, and then purge it from **Recently Deleted**. I've seen relatively old questions similar to mine reference "phantom" photos, and the idea that [manually changing the clock on my device](https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/263732/photos-taking-up-storage-on-iphone-when-i-have-no-photos) might help reveal hidden photos that are stealing this space. I've found [that advice](https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/202692/130404) is not relevant to me. It seems like a functional and/or UX bug on Apple's part that the system can't explain this discrepancy between the reported quantity of photos on the phone and the reported storage usage by the **Photos** library on the phone. [Resetting my device to factory settings](https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/166803/130404) would likely fix the issue, but that seems heavy handed, and I was hoping a more elegant fix might exist here in the year 2025. Is there another way to resolve this issue?

My phone has been refusing to connect to my computer for a while now. It shows up as a USB device, but not in the Finder, Photos, Music, or any other place where I can interact with it. iPhone: - Product ID: 0x12a8 - Vendor ID: 0x05ac (Apple Inc.) - Version: 14.04 - Serial Number: 00008110001E0D4E1E42401E - Speed: Up to 480 Mb/s - Manufacturer: Apple Inc. - Location ID: 0x14100000 / 6 - Current Available (mA): 500 - Extra Operating Current (mA): 0 I´m running on macOS 13.6.4 (22G513) on an Intel Desktop, and the phone is on iOS 18.5. Looking through the apple help page does not resolve the issue. **Look in the Finder, iTunes, or Apple Devices** This is the original issue. **Check your USB cable and connection** I checked different ports. My phone also shows up on a MacBook with the same cable, but not the computer I want to sync to. The USB ports also work fine for any other device. **Update the software on all your devices** Neither phone nor computer offer any updates atm. **Restart your devices** Done, to no avail. **Allow your accessory to connect, if asked** Was asked once after resetting some privacy permissions on the phone, but nothing shows up in the finder.

I created two photo books on one Mac, but that Mac is getting a little constrained on space (this has now actually become more important, because I can not update to El Capitan because there is not enough space). Eventhough I've set Photos to "optimize storage", its library is almost 50 GB and I suspect my two photo albums are partly to blame. Regardless, I'd rather move these projects to the Mac that contains the full ibrary for safe keeping. Is there any way to do this? I can't find any "export" option, or some such. I asked the same question over on the Apple support community, and the answer was it can't be done. The same answer is given to a similar question on here, but for iPhoto (https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/53987/how-do-i-move-an-iphoto-11-book-project-from-one-mac-to-another) . However, when I open up the library using "Show package contents" I can actually see what appears to be all the data associated with the projects in resources/projects. I've tried copying one of those directories into the target Photos library, but as soon as Photos is started, the copied directory is removed. It seems that if only I could set the right metadata somewhere, this should work.

I have a large iCloud photo library of about 30,000 irreplaceable images and videos. It is entirely hosted on icloud - I am using the 'optimise iphone storage' setting and have no high res images stored locally on my laptop as the library is too large. I'm getting concerned that iCloud is the only place I have the full resolution images stored and I want to download a backup of the entire library to an external HDD (preferred), or a second cloud service (less preferable) to ensure I have a second copy. I am happy keeping my main library on icloud as it works well for me and allows me to sync all my different devices (iphone, macbook, 2x ipads), I'm just looking to make a second **backup** copy in case something goes wrong. I don't need to use or access these photos under normal circumstance. I can't work out how to do this. The only options I seem to be able to find is to either download 1000 images at a time from iCloud to my external HDD (which is near impossible as I can't work out how to select 1000 at once), or download the entire library to my laptop, then backup from there - which I don't have space for on my laptop (photos library is 250GB, laptop entire SSD is 250GB). I'm not especially concerned about preserving file structure or anything like that, I just want to make sure I have all the images in case anything ever goes wrong with iCloud. What is the most sensible option? I'll pay for 3rd party software if that's the only option, though happy to put in some legwork to do it manually if there is a sensible way to do it. I don't mind manually adding future pics to the backup.

Super simple use case: 1. Take a picture on iPhone. 1. Go to Mac, open a program where I can choose a file to send to a friend. 1. Click on Media / Photos in the shortcuts bar. 1. Wait for it ... intended picture DOES NOT appear. Instead, I see bunch of old pictures. Why doesn't Finder's Photos integration not able to show the latest pictures I took on my iPhone? Isn't the whole idea of this that I can see what is in my Photos library? And, I have verified that the intended picture is actually showing up in Photos app, just not in the file picker in the Finder integration.

**Problem:** I have an almost 2TB Apple Photos library already downloaded onto an external drive. I wanted to migrate this library into Synology Photos without re-downloading it from the internet. Exporting originals from Apple Photos was too time-consuming and impractical. After some investigation, I discovered that the .photoslibrary file is essentially a regular folder containing an SQLite database and the original images and videos. So, I moved this file to my Synology NAS. **Expected Outcome:** I wanted to move the media files from the .photoslibrary/originals directory into home/Photos on my NAS, organized in a %Y/%m/%d directory hierarchy. Ideally I would like to keep as much as possible metadata from Apple Photos. **Solution:** I created a program that: 1. Recursively loops through all files inside the originals directory. 2. Queries a CSV file (exported from the ZASSET table in the Apple Photos SQLite database). The CSV contains two columns: ZFILENAME and ZDATECREATED. 3. Converts ZDATECREATED into %Y/%m/%d format and creates/selects the appropriate folder inside home/Photos. 4. Moves the file into that directory. **Shortcomings:** A significant number of files in the originals directory have _2, _3 suffixes before the extension, and the database does not have ZASSET records for these files. How should I handle these? In general, I'd like to hear suggestions from anyone who has done a similar migration of their Apple Photos library to Synology Photos. What is the best method with the least metadata loss?

Using Photos.app on the Mac and Importing all photos doesn't work (it gets stuck on "Importing 3 out of 2421...") So I switched to Image Capture.app which should be easier to debug. Image Capture.app fails if there are two photos with the same name excluding the extension. For example, there could be an IMG_1110.HEIC from this year and an IMG_1110.HEIC from last year in the list that Image Capture shows (perhaps because of AirDrop or copying photos via other means to the iPhone, I'm not sure how two totally different photos ended up there with the same name) and Image Capture will fail when it hits the second one (it says "Camera disconnected during import"). The same problem happens if there is IMG_0667.HEIC and IMG_0667.MOV. In these cases, the only solution I can think of is to go into my iPhone, delete the least desired of the two conflicting photos, then resume Image Capture's Download All. So I have to perform _a lot_ of manual intervention to import photos to my Mac using Photos.app or Image Capture.app, and it's also a huge shame that it's impossible to preserve _both_ files without going through a lot more pain and hassle. Please can someone teach me an easy, pain point-free way to just copy all the photos from my iPhone to my Mac.

Is there a way to change the video playback rate for videos viewed in Photos app on macOS?

I have written long ago an Applescript script that exports pictures selected in Apple Photos app with various basic options, such as adding borders, adjusting size, tuning for Web publishing, etc, and the addition of metadata copyright info using an exiftool command thru a shell script. But I cannot figure how to preserve the original files metadata in the exported images, and this turns out to become a critical need now in my current activities. I am considering locating the original file in the "Masters" Photo Library folder, extracting and saving the metadata with an exiftool command, and applying the same metadata to the exported files, but the simple task of obtaining the POSIX path of the original file proves to be challenging (I am 72 years old) and the other tasks challenging as well. Anyone here with better ideas ?

So unbelievably I have *never* cleared my history in SMS/iMessages/Messages. Ostensibly, I should be able to scroll up and eventually see my first text message from my first gen iPhone. This is, unsurprisingly, taking up a considerable amount of space on my phone, but a big part of why I've never cleaned it out is that it contains a tremendous number of pictures of my daughters my wife has sent me over the years. It doesn't seem like these get saved to my photo roll and there doesn't appear to be any way to bulk export them. It may be worth noting that I use desktop messages in Yosemite and it seems work well, so there may be an approach I can use from that angle. What's the best way for me to archive all the photo attachments from almost seven years of text messages?

To free up space on my iPhone I'd like to remove all photos and 'start fresh'. They are currently backed up in iCloud. Is there a way to: a) delete them from the phone, but leaving them in the cloud, and b) re-enable the sync so that all new photos are saved to the cloud too? Point b is crucial as the solutions I found online involve three steps - with a major drawback: 1. disable the iCloud sync 2. delete all photos from phone (as sync is disabled, they will stay on iCloud) 3. the drawback: don't enable the sync ever again, otherwise the photos deleted from the phone will also be deleted from iCloud. (this sounds really stupid but don't want to risk it!)

How to permanently disable the live photo setting? The "live photo" option is turned on in the preserve settings menu, but live photo turns itself on every time I turn it off in the camera app. What can be done?

I have an old iPhone 4 with iOS 7.1.2 that I want to backup and sync the photos off of. I have a macOS 10.12, 10.13 and 10.15 device that I was hoping to backup to (if I have to I can try to dig up some older macbooks that might have an older version of OSX on them). For some reason when I plug the iphone 4 in to any device then the iPhone doesn't show up in Finder or iTunes (tho it does draw power from the mac), so I'm not able to make a backup or import the photos. I'm wondering why the iphone doesn't show up on any macOS device that I plug it in to, and what I need to do to make a backup and/or import the photos?

Apple Photos is automatically finding the faces of my pets and tagging them as the same pet. However, on 4 of my pets I've found that it creates duplicate "Pets" for them and it's not providing me the option to merge the two. I do see that option if I select one of those pets and a totally different pet, but not these two duplicate Pets. One thought I had is that this may be related to Apple sometimes thinking that "both" pets are in the same photo even though there is only one. However, perhaps more importantly, I also noticed that when right clicking when both are selected compared to when I choose one with another pet it seems to think that one of these is a "Person" and one is a "Pet". Any way to fix this? *** In this screenshot, I've selected two of the pets that are the same, I right clicked and do not see an option to merge these pets. *** In this screenshot, I've selected one of the pets from the previous example along with a totally different pet and here when I right click I do see the option to merge these pets. *** In this screenshot, I've selected the other of the duplicate pets and then the totally different pet and am also missing the merge option.

I'm looking at photos on a memory stick and the mac has frozen a couple of times - when it unfreezes the file has changed and I can't access the folder again. Please can someone help get the photos back as they're of my kids... ![Screenshot of new file type ][1] This is what it shows on Terminal when I try to open it: ![Screenshot of terminal output ][2]

How do I set the default zoom for the camera to be 0.5x instead of 1x? I have already turned on the setting for "Remember my last setting that I left the Camera app on". However, when I come back to the camera app, it opens again at 1x zoom. Please help!

Uploading about 600GB of photos to iCloud Photos over a 300KB uplink takes weeks but also creates network congestion that destroys any download bandwidth. The only obvious way to control it is to navigate to the Photos Preferences window and hit the Pause or Continue button. Is there any way to do this from the command line? Any launchctl commands that might work?