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.

Update:

Using File Explorer to manually copy the files from phone/usb to Photos, it appears it does not list all the files in the source! On one occasion when I errored out, I compared what the phone actually had around the error by date, and found FIVE missing from Explorer's view.

This has to be a bug in the file handler for that device being unable to list every file. So while I have more photos than I had before, I still don't have them all!

I give up

I cant get past this screen when i try to import photos from my iphone. It found the photos but i cant import. Why?

It found the photos but i cant import. Why?

Hi Jeanette, 

That is the problem!

This is a bug. You would have the same bug with an Android smartphone or a camera...

Yeah.  MS Photos does not seem to work.  Maybe I can get one movie to trasnfer, then it wil not work at all, cant stay connecte ot iPad.

SOLUTION (a bit of a hack, but no coding involved):  Move the movies on your ipad to a new folder you create in the process, and save under the "Numbers" or "Pages" folders.  You can do this by hitting "select" near the upper right hand corner when you ar browsing photos.  Then after you select the ones you want, then hit the share button in the lower left hand corner.  then scorrl down to th ebottom and select "save to files"  Then make a new folder under "Numbers".

Then use the itunes file sharing feature to browse to your folder and save the whole folder to your computer.  This is also not totally easy to use and the published Apple instructions are kinda vague, but it does work.

Why doesnt Itune just let you xfer movies and photos easily?  I dont know.  Seems like MS and Apple just dont want to make things easy.