how to get photos off an old phone, one drawer at a time.

old phones are easy to put off. they're out of sight, the charger is somewhere else, and there's a quiet worry that switching one on will be the thing that breaks it. but a phone that sits unused doesn't stay the same forever. a battery left completely flat for years can stop taking a charge, and the longer a phone waits, the harder it can be to find a cable that fits it.

the good news: getting photos off an old phone is usually simpler than it feels. it takes a cable, a computer, an hour or so, and a little patience.

before you start: gather three things

• the phone and a cable that fits it. older iphones use a lightning cable, newer ones use usb-c, and many older android phones use micro-usb.
• a computer with room to spare. as a rough guide, leave as much free space as the phone's storage size.
• the passcode, if you can find it. old notebooks and password managers are worth a look.

then make one folder on the computer for this phone and name it plainly, like old iphone 6 or sam's galaxy. everything from this phone goes in there, untouched.

step 1: get it to turn on

plug the phone in with a cable and wall charger you know work, and leave it alone for a while. a phone whose battery has run completely flat may show nothing at all for the first several minutes. if nothing happens after an hour or so, try a different cable and charger before deciding it's dead.

once it turns on, keep it plugged in while you work. if it still won't start, don't keep trying over and over. skip ahead to what to do when it won't turn on.

step 2: check whether it already backed up

before copying anything, spend five minutes finding out whether the photos already went somewhere else. plenty of phones were quietly backing up for years.

• on an iphone, open settings, tap your name, then icloud, and see whether photos was switched on. if it was, your pictures may already be waiting at icloud.com.
• on an android, open the google photos app and see whether backup is on, or sign in at photos.google.com with the google account that phone used.

a backup is a welcome surprise, but don't stop there. backups get switched off, run out of space, or keep smaller copies than the originals. google photos, for example, has a storage saver setting that keeps compressed versions. if the phone works, copy from the phone itself too.

step 3: copy photos off an old iphone

first, one setting worth knowing. iphones from the last several years save photos in a format called heic. on the phone, open settings, then photos, and under transfer to mac or pc choose keep originals. that way the files come across exactly as they were taken, instead of being converted on the way.

on a mac: connect the iphone with a cable and unlock it. if the phone asks whether to trust this computer, tap trust. open the photos app, or image capture, which comes with every mac, choose the iphone and import everything into your folder.

on a windows pc: apple's instructions are to install the apple devices app from the microsoft store first. then connect and unlock the iphone, tap trust, open the windows photos app and choose import. some windows computers need a free extension from the microsoft store to open heic files once they're copied.

if an import stalls partway through, unplug, unlock the phone again and try smaller batches, a year or two at a time.

step 4: copy photos off an old android phone

connect the phone with a usb cable and unlock it. a notification about the usb connection will appear on the phone. tap it and choose file transfer, sometimes labeled transferring files or mtp.

on a windows pc, the phone then shows up in file explorer like a drive. on a mac, android phones don't show up on their own, and google no longer offers its old mac transfer app. a free, open-source app called openmtp does the same job, or, if the phone backed up, you can download everything from google photos instead.

once you're in, here's where to look:

• dcim, then camera. this is the camera roll, and the most important folder.
• pictures, movies and download. screenshots, edited copies and saved images often land here.
• folders named after messaging apps. photos and videos people sent you are often kept separately from the camera roll.

copy whole folders across rather than picking files one by one. and if the phone has a microsd card slot, check it. some phones saved photos to the card, which you can take out and read with an inexpensive card reader.

what to do when it won't turn on, or the passcode is gone

this is where it helps to be honest: there aren't many shortcuts, and some promises you'll find online are too good to be true.

• a forgotten iphone passcode. apple doesn't offer a way past the passcode without erasing the phone, and erasing it erases the photos. before anything else, check icloud.com for icloud photos or an older backup. if you try old passcodes, go slowly. each wrong guess makes the phone wait longer before the next try, and if erase data was switched on, ten wrong tries will erase it.
• a forgotten android pin or pattern. it's much the same: a reset usually erases the phone. check photos.google.com first, with every google account you might have used.
• a phone that won't power on at all. if it had a memory card, the card may still be readable. beyond that, a phone repair shop can sometimes replace a battery or port and get it running long enough to copy from, and data recovery services exist for harder cases. ask for a quote first, since prices vary widely.

if none of that works today, don't throw the phone away. put it in a bag with a label, its cable and anything you remember about it. passcodes have a way of turning up in old notebooks.

step 5: check what you copied before you let go

before you wipe, sell or recycle an old phone, open its folder on the computer and look. scroll to the oldest and newest photos and make sure both are there. play a couple of videos all the way through. compare the rough count with what the phone's photos app showed.

then make a second copy somewhere else, like an external drive. until the photos live in two places, the old phone is still one of the copies, so keep it until then.

then do the next one

one phone per sitting is plenty. start with the one you're most worried about, usually the oldest. once every phone has its own folder, safely stored in two places, the next step is putting all of it in order by when it happened. we wrote a guide for that: how to organize old digital photos, by when they happened.

where treasure box fits

treasure box is the private life archive we're building for the photos you've just rescued. you bring them in from your browser, it reads the date each one was taken, and it lays them out on one private timeline next to every other phone and drive, so 2014 sits next to 2014 no matter which device it came from. it tells you when your files are safely stored, and you can take a full copy out anytime.

if that sounds like the home your old phones have been waiting for, see how treasure box works or read our privacy promises.

← more from the blog