Image of a hand holding an iPhone to take a picture

How to use Image Capture on a Mac to download images from your iPhone

This post explains how to use Image Capture on a Mac to download images from your iPhone. The reason being from time to time we need to obtain those images to use developing your site, especially when we know those images can be used to position your business nicely and more authentically than using stock images.

While there are export options from the Photos app, or even iCloud.com, that work just as well there are circumstances where this may not be practical, where we don’t want those images in our personal photo libraries, or we are simply wanting to obtain some images off another persons iPhone ( obviously with their permission ).

This is where Image Capture comes in handy. Image Capture is available on all Mac OS versions and can be found in the Applications folder.

The following steps explain how to use Image Capture on a Mac to download images from your iPhone or iPad. You can use these steps to download all, or individual, images and save them to your Mac, to Dropbox, to a USB drive or more.

Step 1: Open the Applications Folder

From the Mac’s Finder select Go -> Applications

Image of Mac desktop opening the applications folder

Step 2: Locate Image Capture and double click it to open the App.

As you can see it’s not particularly exciting to look at.

Hint: For a shortcut press cmd + spacebar to open the Spotlight Search window and type Image Capture, it should locate the app and allow your to open it.

Step 3: Using a lightning to USB ( standard iPhone ) cable, plug your iPhone into the Mac

Be sure that your iPhone unlocked. You will see the iPhone show up in the left sidebar.

Step 4: Click on iPhone ( or whatever the phone is named ).

You may be prompted to unlock your phone, the iPhone will ask you to trust the computer, do that.

Step 5: You will now see a list of all the images, and videos that are on the iPhone.

You now have the option to import all, or a selection of, the images and save them to a specific location on your Mac or external drive. In this case Import means to download the image(s) from your iPhone to your computer.

Let’s say we just want to use Image Capture on a Mac to download a selection of images and save them to a Dropbox folder.

Control + Click the images you wish to import.

On the bottom of the app screen use the ‘Import To’ drop down to select the destination. In this case we can’t see Dropbox so we would select Other.

A standard Mac dialog box opens allowing us to select Dropbox and the relevant folder in which to save the images. Choose the folder, job done.

I hope that’s given you some insight into an easy option using Image Capture to send us those awesome website images.

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