When Apple released the iPhone, smartphones with cameras started to replace digital cameras as the preferred method of capturing personal moments and precious memories. As the cameras on iPhones and even iPads became more and more advanced, the popularity of using your phone as your primary camera for taking candid photos became mainstream.  The average iPhone user has more than 600 photos store on their phone. However, many iPhone users do not know how to get their photos from their phone to a computer or USB backup device.

The most basic way to transfer your photos from your iPhone to your computer is to manually connect your phone to your computer using your phone’s USB charging cable. Once connected, your iPhone will ask if you want to trust the computer. You must tap on the “Trust” button in order for the phone to connect properly to the computer. Once connected, you can open up the phone’s storage, navigate to the camera DCIM folder, and manually copy your photos to your computer. This process may be too complicated for novice computer users. It is also difficult to find specific photos as pictures are stored in many different folders on the phone.

Apple offers iPhone users 5GB of free iCloud storage. When iCloud for photos is enabled, photos maybe uploaded to the cloud and removed from the phone itself. All that remains is a small, low quality thumbnail of the photo. Users can then log into their iCloud account on their computer and download photos to their computer. We have heard some complaints that photos or sometimes stored in iCloud at lower quality than the original. Some users have reported that they cannot access the original quality photos through iCloud. After 5GB of storage is used, iCloud users must pay a monthly storage fee.

iPhones offer another feature for transferring photos from the phone called AirDrop. This is a great way to easily share photos two other iPhone or Apple device users. Of course, the biggest downside to this is that it only transfers to other Apple devices. You cannot use AirDrop to transfer photos from your phone to a Windows computer.

There is one more method to download your photos from your iPhone or iPad to your PC. The Photo Backup Stick Universal is a USB product with specialized apps that make transferring your photos easy. It Connects directly to your iPhone or iPad with a Lightning connector. The Photo Backup Stick Universal iOS App then allows you to backup your photos to the USB drive with the tap of a button. Of course, you can choose to back up individual photos, entire albums, or all of your photos and videos at the same time. This method is easiest method we have found to get your photos backed up to a USB drive. Once backed up, plug the USB drive into a Windows or Mac computer and run the Photo Backup Stick app to easily copy your backup to the computer. The Photo Backup Stick apps are also filled with useful features such as removing duplicates, converting HEIC photos to JPG format, and backing up from Android phones and tablets, Windows computers, and Mac computers. The Photo Backup Stick Universal was designed with non-technical users in mind. It is also the only picture backup tool on the market with live phone support, live chat support, and email support.