How to Backup Photos from iPhone to External Hard Drive?

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It is a good idea to backup photos from your iPhone to multiple locations, just in case if you lose one backup, you can obviously retrieve it from the redundant backup. To have redundant backups, you may consider to backup iPhone photos to an external hard drive as well. Here's how you can backup iPhone photos onto an external hard drive.

  1. Connect Your External Hard Drive To Your Mac. First, connect the hard drive to your Mac and make sure it shows up in the Finder’s sidebar. 
  2. Connect Your iOS Device To Your Mac. The first thing you need to do is connect your iPhone or iPad to your Mac using the USB to the Lightning connector you got with your device.
  3. Launch Image Capture. Image Capture on Mac is one of the most underrated utilities. To launch it, search for “Image Capture” using Spotlight search (using Cmd + Space shortcut).
  4. After you launch it, find your iOS device in the left sidebar and click on it. You’ll now see a list of all the photos on your iPhone or iPad right there. You can either use the keyboard shortcut Cmd + A to select all or just individually check mark all the images you want to import.
  5. Select Destination. By default, photos will be imported into the Pictures folder. Click the drop-down, and select “Other”. Now select the folder in the external hard drive as a source.
  6. Click Import. Click the “Import” button and wait until the transfer is done. If the external hard drive is USB 2.0 spec, and you have a lot of photos, this could take more than just a couple of minutes.

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