Got an iPhone 6 (these are from 2013?) with a load of pictures on it. Got a 2012-vintageDell laptop running the ten-year-old OS Windows 7 Professional at work.
In the past, with other Windows-runninglaptops (even older ones from, say, 2009-2012), I’d just plug in the iPhone via USB port and the laptop would recognize the iPhone as another drive. Getting photos off of the iPhone onto those laptops was a cinch.
Can’t seem to do it on my current laptop, though. Current laptop does not recognize the phone as a drive.What happens when I plug in the iPhone is that iTunes pops up and gives an error message.
Unfortunately, I was not the one who “set up” those other laptops … so whatever was done to make the photo/file transfer from the iPhone so seamless, I have no understanding of it
Really, I just want current laptop to read the iPhone as a drive. Don’t want to use iTunes or iCloud or any other software or devices. Just phone to laptop, as I had done in the past. I have Googled this and read several articles. Nothing they’ve suggested seems to work.
Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
… I try to Google this stuff, but I don’t seem to have the foundational knowledge necessary to follow the advice that I do turn up. Most of my knowledge about computers and technology is frozen in around 2005. I was a late adopter to smart phones, and while I can use smart phones for my own purposes … I’ve never really tinkered under the hood with them at all.
iOS does not work like this. You can transfer photos from the iPhone like a digital camera from within Windows Explorer, and you can use iTunes to transfer files to specific apps installed on the phone, but by design it cannot be made to work like a mass storage device.
I am explaining it incorrectly - the bolded is exactly what I am trying to accomplish.
Background: I’ve had several other work-issued Windows laptops with which getting photos off of an iPhone was effortless. Plug iPhone into laptop via USB cable, move photos as desired. If there was any third-party software beyond a device driver facilitating this ease-of-use, I was not aware of it.
Now I’m at a different employer – a small outfit with no dedicated IT staff. I can see that my laptop once interfaced with a former employee’s iPhone via iTunes (seems she used iTunes strictly for playing music off of her iPhone). But when I plug in my iPhone, neither iTunes nor my laptop itself (via Windows Explorer) recognizes my iPhone as a device.
However. Under the Control Panel “Devices and Printers”, I can see that Windows DOES, in fact, know that an Apple device is plugged in – but Windows is treating the iPhone as an “Unspecified” device. Smells like a driver issue, maybe?
Are you using an actual Apple cable? I’ve had problems with my laptop recognizing my iphone when I use an aftermarket cable. Same goal as you (getting pics off) and and same problem where iTunes opens but the computer doesn’t recognize the device’s storage. I have an old iPhone 5 but a slightly newer laptop.
This ended up being the solution. I didn’t understand that iTunes had anything to do with how a Windows machine read files (photos) off of an iPhone.
The iTunes re-install also updated an Apple Device USB Driver (fuzzy on the name). That driver does, indeed, make my iPhone look like a separate drive in Windows Explorer. I may not be able to use it like a drive, but the interface between my laptop and my iPhone is visually the same as the interface between, say, my laptop and the contents of a flash drive or CD.
