I’ve been searching online for an answer to my specific question, which I’m not finding.
I’m traveling for work and have been loaned a Mac Book Pro for work and personal use for the 3 months I’m gone. My iPhone is just about full with photos and I’d like to back them up. I know how to sync up my phone with this laptop- that’s no problem, but since the laptop isn’t mine, I’m kind of worried about getting them back off the laptop and transferred to my home iPhoto account.
I’ve never quite “gotten” the concept of iCloud and how it might figure into this. Might it?
Can anybody help (or fill in the blanks in my understanding of where my content actually lives when it’s not on my phone)?
I’m pretty sure that iPhoto doesn’t care who’s iPhone it is.
If you have iPhoto on the loaner machine, and plug in your iPhone, you should be able to import your photos by launching iPhoto and clicking “import.”
If you don’t want to use iPhoto, Image Capture doesn’t care about ownership, either.
But let’s say I back up all of my photos to the iPhoto on this loaner computer, and then I go and fill up my iPhone again with photos. How do I get the photos on the loaner computer back onto my home computer? I don’t know if iCloud will handle that for me, or if I’m really treating both pieces of equipment like two separate hard drives that I need to transfer pictures to and from via the phone.
If you want all of your photos to be backed up to a single place, that is what the various “cloud” programs do. There’s iCloud, Mozy, Dropbox…
The way they work is that the photos are on the internet servers owned by a private corporation. The servers are generally in a locked facility with backup power, and the files are backed up onto tape drives. For the credible companies who have been around for a while (such as Apple computer), data losses are rare to nonexistent. Obviously, it is possible for the government to view these photos if they fill out the right paperwork, but keep in mind that if they really were after you, they’d just batter down your door and take your phone anyways.
Keep in mind that if the photos are really important, a cloud backup and the phone are not sufficient to guarantee you won’t lose the photos. If the photos are crucial, you will also want to make some offline backups to a robust media (like a DVD-R) and to use more than one account to a cloud service.
But if they are family pictures, you can probably settle for merely a cloud backup and the data on the phone itself.
If you don’t want to wait for iPhoto, or you don’t want it organising your photos, or you want access to the actual .jpg files instead of a database, Image Capture is faster and simpler. (Windows users can just use Windows Explorer) But for me, Image Capture eventually stopped working. I found you can use Preview as well: Transfer Photos from iPhone to Computer
Except for my iPhone I’m strictly a Windows guy. If you plug an iPhone into a USB port on a Windows machine it will appear in My Computer, and if you go down a folder or so there will by a standard DCIM folder for photos like all digital camera media. However, hacking or special software aside, it’s the *only *kind of files on the iPhone that you can simply copy off it (you can’t see music, video etc.).
Assuming you’ve got iCloud enabled, and Photo Stream turned on (both on the phone and on the home computer with iPhoto), you don’t need to do anything else. This is all fully transparent to the user.
Every photo you take on the phone will be “delivered” to your home computer over wifi within a few minutes of (a) you taking it, and (b) your phone connecting to a wifi network that can see the Internet.
Go into iPhoto on your home computer, click on “Photo Stream” (you may have to turn it on in iPhoto and/or the iCloud system preference pane), and I bet you’ll see all your photos already there. If not, turn Photo Stream on in prefs on the iPhone, and all subsequent ones should come through. You don’t need to worry about or use the loaner computer at all.
(If your home computer is Windows, you can download the iCloud software from Apple for it. Photostream works the same way there, except it delivers the photos to a folder you designate, rather than iPhoto).
Or just install the iCloud software for Windows like I mentioned above. It lets you designate a folder on your machine to receive the Photo Stream photos automatically.