How to import photos from a Pixel phone with OS X Mojave

If you own a pixel phone you may have discovered that since Apple released Mojave in late 2018 you can no longer transfer photos from your Google pixel. I have not seen a solution published for this anywhere. Image capture no longer detects a Pixel Phone. The Apple Photos App connects over USB but it doesn’t recognise any pictures from the Pixel Phone even after you select PTP. (It just says ‘No Photo’) The Android File Transfer App is temperamental – it works sometimes. You can of course upload the photos to Google photos then download them to your computer but that’s cumbersome.

I found the best solution is a little app called Pocketshare which allows you to mount your Google phone directly as a shared network hard drive on your computer. From there you can just copy the photos directly to your Photos app. It’s only $1.99 for the full version.

Here’s how it works.

1. Download the Pocketshare App from the Google Play Store.
2. By default you can only access the default pocketshare folder so you’ll need to make the $1.99 in-app purchase to be able to access your camera folder.
3. Make sure your Pixel in on the same wifi network as your computer.
4. Open Pocketshare and make a share. Give it a title. (I called mine Pixel Phone). When you select a user and password be sure to make it secure otherwise anyone will be able to access your files!
5. Under settings ‘Share Folder’ select ‘Custom Path’ and then you can just select ‘DCIM’ and then ‘Camera’ to just access your photos.

To connect to your Pixel Phone and import your photos:

1. On OS X from the ‘Go’ menu select ‘Connect to Server.
2. Select ‘Browse’ and look for whatever you named your Share (e.g. ‘Pixel Phone’). The authors of Pocketshare have made the app play nicely with OSX so that you don’t need to type in any complicated IP addresses – it appears in the window by name.
3. Click to connect, enter your name and password, and you should see an extra hard drive appear on your desktop which is your Google Phone!
4. Navigate to the folder called ‘DCIM’
5. Inside DCIM is a folder called ‘Camera’ which has all your photos. You can drag the photos directly into to Apple Photos app to import them.

UPDATE: September 2019

Pocketshare stopped working for me recently.

OSX just says ‘Connection Refused.’ I’m in OSX 10.14.6.

I found a work-around. Look at the IP address of your phone in pocket share. (In the screenshot of pocket share above it’s 192.168.2.4.

In the ‘Go’ menu of OSX type in ftp://192.168.2.4:8081

That allowed me to transfer files.