I have an iPhone 13 and a new model 14inch m1 MacBook Pro. I’d love to copy the photo’s from my iPhone to my MacBook Pro. I can’t find a way to do it easily. The only option seems to be using a lightning to USB cable, but even then the processes painfully slow. There are some paid apps on the App Store that claim to allow transfer over wifi, which reinforces to me the idea that it can’t be done over wifi without extra software. I’ve done a lot of searching and can’t see that anyone has an answer yet. If you do find a solution, please let me know in a comment below.

wifi sync

There is an option from finder to do a wifi sync of a phone, but even I you select ‘Sync’ for photos it doesn’t’ copy the photos from the iPhone to the computer.

iCloud

iCloud is obviously Apple’s preferred way of doing it but it requires you to pay for extra iCloud storage space. I just want to transfer the photos directly form my iPhone to my laptop Photos library.

Plug-in lightning cable

Apple offer the ability to copy photos from an iPhone directly to Photos app. But to do so requires a physical connection, you can’t do it over wifi. I found the copy process to be tediously slow. I connected my iPhone to my laptop before I started writing this article half an hour ago and it’s still sitting at ‘Preparing to import from “Wayne’s iPhone”‘

Airdrop

Airdrop is an option that works, but you need to select the photos one by one, and it drops them into the downloads folder of you MacBook (not into the Photos app).

If anyone has found a way to do this, drop a comment below!