Photos app freezes upon import / photo importing problems

Well, I've been having this problem since September, and today it got worse, but I think I know exactly where the issue is now!

I am using a fully patched Windows 10 PC and an iPhone, and this problem is deeper than just the Photos app! This morning, when I opened file explorer and went to one of the directory under DCIM on my iPhone, every .jpg had a similarly named .mov, which is WRONG! I know I occasionally get these files depending upon the camera settings, but not for every single one. I could delete these .mov files, disconnect and reconnect the iPhone and, by magic they were they again. This means that the piece of Microsoftware that is handling the phone over USB is where the problem lies. This is probably for any phone.

So I started copying them in small batched to a separate USB drive. If I tried "too many", Explorer would choke on an occasional file, pause for a while and then throw a hardware error. I could reset it by disconnecting/reconnecting the phone, which reloaded all the code relevant to the phone; if I cancelled it when I paused, I could simply copy and ignore/replace the successful ones from the prior copy. In all cases it would work.

Whenever I had a few hundred on the USB drive, I could import them using Photos without a problem!

Like I said, I've been fighting this since September. MS were caught out by the introduction of HEIC format for photos and HEVC format by videos - the extensions were not even included in Windows Updates. Once I paid my $0.99 and installed the HEIC/HEIF/HEVC extension package, I was able to view .HEIC photos in the Photos app and the excellent Faststone Image Viewer/Resizer.

Microsoft appears to have tried to fix this with Windows updates several times, but have never got down to the root of the problem and have somebody who can write and test extension/driver code FIX IT! It could be a memory leak triggered by the number/format of photos in an Import, or just crappy code; if I knew, I would give it to everyone and then charge Microsoft a lot more that $0.99 to give them the fix!

So what is the process that works for me -

One Explorer window looking at the iPhone\Internal Storage\DCIM\nnnApple directory, sorted by name

One Explorer windows looking at the usb drive, sorted by name

1. Select ~40-50 files in first window
2. Drag and drop to second window
3. If it stops for more than a couple of seconds or errors out, cancel the copy and drag the same block over again
4. It will tell you that all files in the batch are already in the destination as duplicates and 0 bytes. It is lying. The files already copied are fine. Tell it to ignore them, and it will copy across any missing photos.
5. Repeat until bored
6. Import unto Photos app using "All items" or "All items since last import"
7. Delete all files on usb drive
8. Have a drink
9. Repeat until bored

Should I have to do this? No! But I'm assuming that once I'm up-to-date, I may be able to import directly from the phone.

Today's error message is "Error Copying Folder or File - The requested value cannot be determined" which might correspond to crappy code screwing up its list of files.

Make sure you update your iphone ios to 3.5 as it didn't work till I did.

this finally worked on my iPhone x ios version  3.5 and the Windows 10 Version 2004 (OS Build 19631.1) 

The key I think was the " Settings -> Camera => Formats and change the Camera Capture setting to Most Compatible" and then possibly the windows update. The photos app did crash once as I had over 8K images but I did it again and it finally worked after years of it not.

This did not work for me . (iPhone XR). I have found that some of the replies I've read from this thread work partially and sporatically: e.g., freezes, or  sometimes recognizes x number of photos and then freezes. The bottom line is MICROSOFT NEEDS TO FIX THIS PROBLEM! IT USED TO WORK FINE!  Did anyone open a ticket with Microsoft about this problem?

I rarely set my pictures to "live" format. When I have in the past, the Photos App had no trouble importing my pictures back then.