What is the best way to back up videos I have on my iPhone into an external hard drive? Trying to avoid having to Airdrop into my Macbook Air to then copy over to the external hard drive.
The videos are located in the Photos app (ie the location where videos get immediately saved to)
I have lots of videos from my social media (*** sitting in my Photos app ***) that I would like to delete from my phone to free up storage, but save in an external hard drive in case I need them in the future.
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Daniel A.
I would use iCloud Photos so that your Mac and iPhone are always in sync with the contents of the Photos library. Are you already doing that? If not, consider it as it would make this much easier.
Then you can just export the videos from the Photo app on your Mac to the external drive and delete them from your Photos library. The change would be reflected on your iPhone.
Keep in mind that using iCloud Photos Library will also save you space as long as you have the "Optimize" feature turned on. Older videos will not take up space on your iPhone and just be accessed on-demand from iCloud servers.
Thank you Gary do you have any video recommendations in how to do that? i.e. how to set up photos to sync with my iCloud?
Daniel: You basically just turn it on. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204264
Is it possible to back up iPhone photos and videos directly to an external drive? I back up my MacBook Pro on an external drive and would also like to back up my iPhone images directly to an EXT HD to avoid Mac Photos' weird categorization. There seem to be apps for enabling transfers, like EaseUS MobiMover, MobiKin Assistant for iOS and iMazing. Would these work to by-pass MacBook storage or Cloud storage?
Joan: You can get a drive to connect directly to your iPhone, and you can "share" to that drive. But it would be a lot of work and you'd constantly have to keep it up. Why not keep it simple and automatic and just use iCloud. I'm not sure what you mean by "Mac Photos' weird categorization" -- what are you talking about there?
I would also like an answer to this question. I know iCloud is great and all that, but I’m travelling for several months with long periods of no access to internet. My MacBook died on me but I have an external hard drive I could use to backup my photos and videos directly. Can I just connect my iphone to the drive? And what software do I need to do the transfer?
JC: There's no good way to backup to an external drive directly from an iPhone. I would continue to use iCloud Drive and connect when you can. It only takes one night of good Wi-Fi access to get everything caught up, and then your photos are safe even if you lose your iPhone (and any other devices you may have had).