Unable to import photos and videos from iPhone13 to External HDD using MacBook Air M1

I've trouble in moving files from my iPhone 13 to MacBook Air M1. Both running latest OS updates. Earlier, I have imported few pictures from iPhone to Mac machine. Recently, I bought a brand new Seagate External HDD One Touch 5TB disk which is formatted in ExFAT. However, still I am unable to import photos to my external disk. When I select all photos from my iPhone which is connected to Mac, the Copy option in Edit on the menu bar is greyed out. Further, I am unable to manually drag and drop the pictures. If I selected few photos and click on import it works. However, when I select import all, the Mac automatically kicks my iPhone from the connection and I've to reconnect again to view the photos and videos. This is frustrating. I have raised a support ticket with Apple support and they never helped me out to get this fixed. Ticket number for reference "10*******070".

Could someone please assist me in get this done as this is important for me to backup my photos and videos.

Thanks.

[Edited by Moderator]

iPhone 13, iOS 26

Posted on Nov 14, 2025 11:53 PM

Top-ranking reply

Matti Haveri

Level 6

19,670 points

Posted on Nov 15, 2025 4:00 AM

srinivazs wrote:

a brand new Seagate External HDD One Touch 5TB disk which is formatted in ExFAT

That is your problem. Storing Photos libraries is NOT supported on non-Mac formats like exFAT, FAT, network shares, Time Machine volumes.

APFS and MacOS Extended are supported and it is always recommended to erase a new disk as such (APFS (select GUID partition scheme first) for SSD and MacOS Extended for old spinning HDDs).

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17 replies

Nov 21, 2025 11:04 PM in response to srinivazs

srinivazs wrote:

Image capture does the trick. However, I am confused with the difference in number. From Photo library, photos in iPhone shows 4414. From Image capture, I could see 5981. After image from iPhone to Desktop by creating a sub folder, the number shows 8729 items. The Phone photos shows I've 6187 items. Why there's a difference in numbers?

Photos.app and Image Capture count Live Photo pair as one. Also .AAE files are not counted in Photos (those can be used to continue edits done in the iPhone).

For example, my iPhone "camera roll" was empty and I took 2 live images. Image Capture counts them as 2 items and after import there are 2 such pairs and 4 files in the Finder folder. When imported to Photos library it counts them as 2.

Also images exported from the Mac to the iPhone Photos via the Finder's Photos tab are counted in iPhone Photos. But Image Capture does not list them because they are "owned" by the Mac.

p.s. I usually take care not to shoot live images. But the rest of the family does. And they often use it to pick a good frame from group photos so everyone has eyes open and look their best (the movie frame quality is slightly lower than in the actual image).

srinivazs Author

Level 1

5 points

Nov 24, 2025 10:02 AM in response to Matti Haveri

I just deleted all the Imports from Mac. However, if you look at the storage it still shows I've 150+GB of storage used by photos where I don't find it in Photos/Imports. How this is calculated? This cause another backup to test it. Do I need to format my Mac to free up this space? Is this UI bug?

Unable to import photos and videos from iPhone13 to External HDD using MacBook Air M1