My googling having come up short, I turn to the wisdom here.
I have some pictures on my phone that I took at family gatherings around the deaths of my mother-in-law and my father this year. It has been a while since I took a lot of pictures with my phone, and for some reason, Windows can’t find anything on my phone anymore. No files, no folders, nothing.
The instructions I’ve used in the past don’t seem to work anymore. Other instructions I’ve found don’t work. Most places want me to install their transfer software.
How can I import my pictures from my phone (Moto G4) to my computer with a USB (2.0) cable?
Google Photos is the way I generally do it. If you’ve got it installed on your Android device and back up the photos, then they’ll be available at https://photos.google.com (and I think in a folder on your Google Drive also).
I’ve also had luck with the old standby of “when in doubt, reboot”. Disconnect your devices, reboot both the phone and the computer, then reconnect. Doesn’t always work but occasionally it’ll force the connection to be reset and have your files show up again.
I have a Moto G4 Play, and when I tried connecting it to the computer via USB, my PC wouldn’t show anything on it.
But then I noticed when I picked up my phone that it had a notification-like thing in wait. When I pulled it out to check, it was something asking what I wanted to do with the USB connection - work as a drive, export photos, etc. When I chose the drive option it appeared on my PC.
Now, if that isn’t working for you, I’m afraid I’m out of ideas.
Installing the PC app to upload your decades worth of older pics, while using the mobile app to push current pics and videos is transformational. Awesome product.
Is it smart enough to check for duplicates, I wonder. My PC have iCloud running to sync photos from iCloud (which was uploaded by the phone). Let’s see. Unlimited storage is fun :)
It’s really amazing. It does recognizes the subject and location for all your photos, so if you took a trip with your friend you can search for “Bobby in Singapore” and it will magically bring up all those pictures. You can create albums and share them with friends and family too. Oh, and it has an “auto fix” tool that just magically makes your photos look better, sharper, better lit, truer colors, etc. Truly great technology. And they give unlimited storage for 16megapixel pictures and 1080p video.
Apple is doing something similar now but they’re a bit behind, it counts against your iCloud storage, and of course that’s Apple ecosystem only. One benefit is that all processing is done clientside and not shared with Apple, so it’s more private.
Google Photos won’t automatically clean-up duplicates for you, but the clients won’t automatically upload duplicates either. So the only way you’ll get any is if you deliberately choose to upload them.
I am still uploading around 12K of photos … but from what I can see, it is pretty smart about determining what is a dup or not? I wonder if it’s filename or if it’s date/time or something. I am very impressed with this. Thanks for the recommendation @stusser.
At one point, I stopped using Picasa and went with Yahoo Flickr because they give unlimited storage. Then the client side Uploadr stopped working unless I pay them money, which I don’t like because of principal (hey, if you are going to charge money, let me know in advance, not after I use the tool for 3 months and then you tell me it’s $49 or something). Anyway, since client side Uploadr is not working, it’s just not worth going on and so I paid Apple instead for 200GB iCloud storage and is pretty happy with it.
Yes, it’s very smart about detecting duplicates on automatic uploads. I’ve never had a dupe. When I said it was Google’s best service, that wasn’t hyperbole!
Issue with Google Photos - I uploaded a few images from my desktop, and they don’t appear in my app, even after waiting a couple days. Any ideas? Googling does not produce any good answers. Is the photos app only for pictures taken from the device?
I haven’t used their separate desktop uploader desktop program, I usually just drag photos on the website, but that works fine and they show up in the photos app.
That didn’t work, pictures refused to appear in the app on my phone. But I figured it out, eventually I went into settings (not app settings) and deleted all app data and cache. This seemed to force the app to refresh all pictures and it worked. Thx
Glad you sorted it! I used the Google Photo uploader app a few years ago, on my entire photo collection from forever (kids as babies, etc). Now I have them backed up, and available everywhere/anywhere. SO great.
