iPhone Disconnected from Image Capture While Importing? Try This Fix
Image Capture has long been a preferred method of getting photos from an iPhone to a computer or external drive, but something I have run into fairly often over the last several years is that Image Capture occasionally randomly disconnects the iPhone during an image transfer. This obviously ends the image transfer in a failure, and it can be difficult if not impossible to figure out where the transfer left off and then begin again, leading to a hassle as you begin another transfer of images, and so on. When this happens, you’ll see an error message that is direct in statement but void of causation, saying simply that “Camera disconnected while importing”.
Having your iPhone disconnect while trying to transfer photos with Image Capture is obviously incredibly annoying, so you’ll be happy to hear there might be a very easy fix for this, though the solution is probably not what you might expect.
Solution: Put iPhone into AirPlane Mode before the image transfer begins
Swipe down into Control Center and toggle AirPlane Mode on, then connect the iPhone to the Mac. Now use Image Capture to begin the image transfer as usual. The photo transfer should now complete without disconnecting randomly.
Apparently the iPhone and Image Capture is sensitive to cellular service and tethering, and if tethering is toggled off or on, or if you have crummy cell service (as many of us do, I live right outside a major metro area and have 1 bar of service at my house).
This little trick arrives at us from wadetregaskis.com via mjtsai, so a big heads up to both of them for a helpful tip that is sure to assist other Mac users, myself included. The error image used in this article is from Wade too, which I then put a little Emoji and background too.
This is not something new, but it is frustrating. Disconnecting the iPhone and camera happened to me with such regularity that I eventually relented and ended up enabling iCloud Photos on my Mac and on my iPhone just so that I could consistently have photos move from one device to another without these disconnections and transfer interruptions. That’s not possible or desirable for all users however, and Image Capture is really the best way to copy images from an iPhone to a Mac or external drive, without having to use iCloud, so this tip should come in handy for many of us.
Anyway, if you have experienced this problem before with Image Capture disconnecting during a file transfer from iPhone, try out this trick, toggle on AirPlane mode first, and see if it resolves the disconnection problem for you.
