How to Copy Pictures from iPhone, Camera, or Memory Card to Photos App on Mac

Many Mac users rely on their iPhone as their primary digital camera, but even if you have a separate camera, or use a variety of memory cards stuffed with images, you may wish to copy pictures from any of those devices directly into the Photos app of OS X. Importing images from any camera, iPhone, iPad, Android, or memory card directly into Photos app is really easy, so if you like using the Photos app as your picture management software, you’ll be happy to know that regardless of the device type, it’s a quick process to copy the pictures directly into Photos app with little effort.

Importing directly from a camera or iOS device is convenient for many users and it works very similar to importing images from the file system into Photos app; you simply review the pictures and choose to import them, and it’s done. It’s that easy.

How to Import Pictures Into Photos App Directly from a Camera, iPhone, iPad, Memory

Card

As you likely noticed by now, Photos app opens automatically by default when a camera or iPhone is connected to the Mac by default, but even if you turned that feature off you can quickly import pictures into Photos app very easily, here are the steps:
1. Connect the digital camera, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or memory card to the Mac
2. Open Photos (if it hasn’t launched itself already, or if you turned off the auto-open feature)
3. Under the “Import” tab, review and select the pictures you want to import from the camera, iPhone, or memory card, then click on the appropriate action:

• Import Selected – only import the pictures you have selected by thumbnail into Photos app
• Import All New Photos – import every new picture into Photos app from the connected device

4. Find the newly imported images in the “Photos” view as usual

It can take a while to import the pictures, depending on how many are stored on the camera, iOS device, or memory card, and the speed of the USB connection if applicable. Just let the process complete so you don’t miss anything.

Remember, when you want to copy pictures from an external device, always go to the “Import” tab in the Photos app, this is where you’ll find the device(s) to copy the pictures from.



Once the images have successfully imported into Photos app, you can clear off the memory card or bulk delete pictures from the iPhone or iPad to free up quite a bit of storage space if you’d like, since the pictures are now stored locally on the Mac.

Note that we’re covering bringing pictures into Photos app directly from an external device here, whether it’s an iPhone or camera or memory card doesn’t matter, as long as the Mac can detect the camera and pictures it will be an import option. If you already have the pictures transferred to the Mac through another application like Preview or Image Capture and stored in the file system but now want to bring those into the Photos app, you can simply import those image files into Photos app without having to pull them from the camera or device again.

Source: OSXDaily, Syncios