Move data from iPhone to windows I friend of mine has no space left on her iPhone, so we bought a external harddrive and try to transfer the photos and videos from the iPhone to the harddrive. I am using windows 10.

I unlocked the phone and connected it to the computer, it appears in the file explorer.



I was able to move all files appearing in there to the external harddrive (I was unable to delete the folders btw, I had to open each folder and delete all files there...)

I thought that was it, but if I open the iPhone and go to photos then there are still thousands of photos, even though the folder "Internal Storage" appearing on windows is empty.

There are also still photos and videos on the iPhone which are not on the external harddrive.

What is going on?

How can I move all media from the iPhone to the external harddrive?!

I also tried it via iTunes, but the "synchronize" field is grayed out even after restarting windows.

I also tried to transfer all the files from iCloud to the computer, but there is a limit of 1000 Photos.
So I installed iCloud for Windows, but the software does not work. The sync is not triggered at all.

Update: I figured out that I have to trigger the synch by clicking on the icon on the down right in the tray. Now I can synchronize the data between the computer and the iPhone
I have had success with simply mounting and using File Explorer to locate the DCIM directory and copying it out.  However, I found it easiest to delete the photos from within the Photos app on the phone itself, despite how tedious that is.

You have to go into the Photos app, select the camera roll album, press 'Select' at the top right, and drag to select the photos you want to delete.  I recommend deleting in batches instead of trying to select them all in one go.  Unfortunately, this doesn't actually delete the photos, it just moves them to the 'Recently Deleted' folder.  Go to that folder, click 'Select' then 'Delete All'.

Yes it's tedious, but it works every time and I've gotten pretty fast at doing it.