How to Transfer iPhone or iPad Photos to Your Windows 10 PC

There’s no doubt that the iPhone and iPad can take amazing pictures — and both devices make it fairly easy to share your photos with others. Apple even has proprietary software that automatically imports photos from your iOS devices to your Mac.

But what if you don’t own a Mac? Or what if you want to download the actual master files of a picture to your PC? Not to worry: if you’re set up on a Windows 10 machine, there are still some easy, painless ways to get your photos from your iPhone to your desktop or notebook PC. Here are a couple options.

Use Explorer to Transfer Your Photos

This is probably the most straightforward and customizable way to get your iOS device photos onto your PC — but it does require some slight computer know-how. Luckily, you can just follow these steps.

1. Firstly, install iTunes. This ensures that your PC and iOS device can communicate properly.
2. Plug in your iOS device to your PC.
3. Launch Windows Explorer. You can do this from the Start menu, desktop or taskbar. Alternatively, just use the keyboard shortcut Windows key + E.
4. Click on the arrow next to This PC to open up the menu options.
5. Find your iPhone in the This PC submenu. By default, your iOS device is called (NAME)’s iPhone or iPad.
6. Double-click the Internal Storage folder.
7. Double-click the DCIM folder.
8. Within, you’ll find a host of folders named something like 100APPLE — or, so on. These folders contain your photos.
9. You can find the photos you want to transfer, or more simply, just click and drag around all of the folders, right-click and hit Copy.
10. Find where you want your pictures to go — maybe in My Pictures, or another location. Right-click and hit Paste.

Transfer Photos Using the Windows 10 Photos App

While Apple has its proprietary Photos app, which makes it simple and painless to get your iPhone pictures onto your Mac, Windows devices have a similar program — and using it to download photos is almost as easy.

1. Again, you’ll need to install iTunes first before you proceed to any other steps.
2. Plug your iOS device into your PC.
3. Launch the Photos app.
4. Click the Import button. They’ll all be imported by default, so you’ll need to choose any photos that you don’t want to import
5. Click Continue.
6. Once the import is done, your pictures will be viewable within the Photos app, and the app will automatically place them in the My Pictures folder, too.

Use iCloud to Transfer Your iOS Device’s Photos to Your PC

This is another easy and convenient way of downloading your iPhone photos to your PC, but it does require you to install an app. While you don’t have to physically plug your phone into your PC using this method, you do want to ensure that the photos you want are actually in your Apple iCloud.

1. Launch a web browser, download and install the iCloud for Windows app.
2. Login to the app using your Apple ID and password. Hit Sign In.
3. Click the Options button next to the Photos menu.
4. Make sure that the box next to My Photo Stream is checked.
5. Make sure that the box next to Upload new photos from my PC is checked.
6. Click Done.
7. Click the Apply button.
8. At this point, any of your photos in iCloud will now be downloaded to your PC. You can go back and tweak some of the upload and Photo Stream options, if you want. But checking them from the start ensures that all of your photos in iCloud will be downloaded.