Help with a Photos problem

We just got back from vacation, and I took a number of photos and videos on my phone. What I do is import every family-related photo to my wife’s computer in Photos.app by manually selecting them (rather than importing all the photos on my phone, which includes a ton of stuff she doesn’t want).

To my knowledge this has worked well in the past, but this time, when I was done, I noticed that photos I remembered taking were not showing up on the computer after import. Checking the phone shows that I’m right. However, on the computer they don’t show up in the import or in the I imported photos.

Now I’m beginning to wonder how many other photos have gone missing in our family library.

Can anybody suggest a solution to getting my photos into Photos (without manually comparing every photo on my phone to every photo on the computer, please)?

TLDR; Some photos on my iPhone aren’t showing up in Photos in my Mac for import.

Anybody run into this or have suggestions for me to try?

Have a look in your Photo Stream… they probably are already on your Mac, so will not show a second time to import.

Cheers,

Dave

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Thanks. Will check.

I don’t have photo stream (or iCloud syncing) turned on, so that wasn’t it.

But hard restarting the phone made them show up the next time I plugged it into the computer.

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@jtbayly Thanks for posting about your problem with photo import, and for posting the ‘fix’. I do the same thing all the time (return from trip, import photos…). I’ve never noticed any photos missing after the import, but then I’ve never been looking for what’s not there. In the future, perhaps I’ll do a hard restart on my iPhone upon return from travels, just to be sure I don’t encounter the same glitch you did.

Another thing to try (which I would have suggested if I’d seen your post earlier) is to do the import using Image Capture. (it’s another Apple application, usually located in /Applications). It imports all or selected photos into a Finder folder. You then drag the folder into Photos. I don’t know whether Image Capture would be more robust than the import function in Photos, but perhaps it wouldn’t miss any like Photos did.

I thought of Image Capture, but the problem was that I didn’t know what photos were missing. Just that some were. So I had no way to find out which ones to import, aside from the one or two I had already found missing. And I didn’t want to import all the photos again, for fear that I’d end up with a ton of duplicates once I moved them into Photos. I’ve been through that miserality before. Never again if I can help it.