Why Windows only shows some of your iPhone photos

Last updated October 18, 2026 · For Windows 10 and 11, iOS 17 and later · About a 10-minute read

You plug your iPhone into your PC, open it in File Explorer, and the DCIM folder shows a fraction of what the phone holds. Or the copy stops partway with "The device is unreachable" or "A device attached to the system is not functioning." Or everything seems to copy, and months later you discover a whole year is missing.

This is not one problem. It is five, and they stack. This guide explains each one in plain words, says honestly which ones you can fix and which you can only work around, and ends with a count-and-compare check so you know, rather than hope, that you got everything.

1. The phone isn't fully open to the PC

What you see: the iPhone appears under This PC but opening it shows nothing, or "Internal Storage" is there but DCIM is empty, or the phone disappears and reappears.

Why: an iPhone shows its photos to a computer only while it is unlocked and only after you have tapped Trust on the phone for that computer. If it locks during a copy, the connection can drop. A worn cable, a USB hub, or a front-panel port that cannot supply enough power does the same thing.

Fix:

• Unlock the phone, plug it in, and tap Trust when asked. If you were never asked, unplug, unlock, and plug in again.
• For a long copy, set Settings → Display & Brightness → Auto-Lock to Never for the duration, and switch off Low Power Mode. Set it back afterwards.
• Use the cable that came with the phone or a known-good data cable (some cheap cables charge but do not carry data), plugged straight into a port on the back of a desktop or directly into a laptop.
• If the phone still never appears, install Apple's free Apple Devices app from the Microsoft Store (or iTunes); it installs the driver Windows needs.

2. Windows reads the phone like a camera, and the phone hands over the list in pieces

What you see: the DCIM folder opens and shows some folders (100APPLE, 101APPLE and so on) but not all of them. A folder shows a few hundred items when the phone has thousands. Explorer's "Working on it..." bar never finishes. Come back twenty minutes later and there is more. Unplug and replug and a different amount shows.

Why: Windows has no special knowledge of iPhones. It talks to the phone over a protocol made for digital cameras, asking for one folder listing at a time, and shows whatever it has received so far. The phone builds those listings on the fly from its photo database, which for a big library is slow work, and it tends to hand them over oldest first. The listing can stop anywhere, with no error, when the phone gets busy, locks, or simply decides it is done for now. We have watched the same phone show 119 of 208 months on one connection and more an hour later. Explorer never tells you that what you are looking at is partial. This is the cause most guides skip, and it is the one behind "I copied everything and a year is missing."

Fix (work-around, really):

• Give it time. Plug in, unlock, leave the phone alone, and do not open the Photos app on it while the PC is reading. Check the folder count again after five, then fifteen minutes.
• Do not trust a single look. Note how many items each DCIM folder shows, unplug, replug, and compare. If the numbers go up, you had a partial list.
• Copy folder by folder rather than selecting all of DCIM, so a stall in one folder does not stop the rest.
• Run the count-and-compare check at the end. It is the only way to know.

3. The full-size originals aren't on the phone at all

What you see: far fewer files than the phone's Photos app shows, or files that copy but are small and blurry, or a copy of a 200 GB library that comes to a few gigabytes.

Why: if Optimize iPhone Storage is on (it is the default when iCloud Photos is on), the phone keeps small previews and leaves the full-size originals in iCloud. The Photos app still looks complete because it downloads originals when you tap them. But a PC connected by cable can only copy what is physically on the phone. No cable, app or tool can reach the originals in iCloud, including ours. Apple's own support page says the same: download the originals to the phone before importing to a PC.

Fix:

1. On the iPhone, open Settings, tap your name, then iCloud, then Photos. (On older iOS versions the same choice is under Settings → Photos.)
2. Choose Download and Keep Originals.
3. Leave the phone on Wi-Fi and plugged into power. For a big library this takes hours and sometimes overnight. The bottom of the Library tab in the Photos app shows the download progress.
4. When the status disappears, connect to the PC and copy again.

If the phone does not have room for all the originals, there is no way around it over USB. Free up space and try again, or download the originals in batches from iCloud.com on the PC, or use iCloud for Windows to download them to a folder. The guide to this website's own app, Help, has the same steps.

4. Converting while copying

What you see: the copy runs for a while and then fails with "The device is unreachable" or "A device attached to the system is not functioning." Retrying fails at a different point. Videos are the usual casualties.

Why: modern iPhones save photos as HEIC and videos as HEVC. The setting Settings → Photos → Transfer to Mac or PC has two options. Automatic makes the phone convert each file to JPEG or H.264 as it is copied, and that conversion, done on the phone in the middle of a USB transfer, is slow and fragile. On a large batch it stalls, the PC gives up waiting, and Windows reports the phone as unreachable.

Fix: set Transfer to Mac or PC to Keep Originals. Files then copy exactly as they are on the phone, which is both faster and more reliable. To open them on Windows, install Microsoft's free HEIF Image Extension and, for videos and some photos, the HEVC Video Extension ($0.99; already included on some PCs), both from the Microsoft Store. Keeping originals also means you keep the real file, not a converted copy.

5. One big video stops the whole copy

What you see: you selected a folder, the copy ran, an error appeared on a video, you clicked Skip or Cancel, and now you are not sure what did and did not copy.

Why: a long 4K video is a single multi-gigabyte file. Reading it over the camera protocol takes minutes, and anything that interrupts the connection during those minutes (the phone locking, a background sync, a power-saving USB port) fails that one file. Explorer copies in order and stops at the first error, so every file after the failing video is also missing, silently.

Fix: copy videos separately from photos, in small batches. Keep the phone unlocked and on power. If one video refuses, try it alone after a replug; if it still fails, it may be an iCloud-only original (see cause 3). Whatever you do, finish with the check below.

6. The count-and-compare check

Three numbers tell you whether you have everything: what the phone says it has, what landed on the PC, and the difference you can explain.

On the phone

Open the Photos app, go to the Library tab, and scroll to the very bottom. It shows a line like "12,345 Photos, 678 Videos." Write both numbers down. (Recently Deleted items are not in that count and will not copy; Hidden items are in the library and do copy.)

On the PC

Open the folder you copied into, press Ctrl+A, right-click, Properties. The Contains line gives the total number of files. For a breakdown by type, open PowerShell in that folder and run:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse -File | Group-Object Extension | Sort-Object Count -Descending | Format-Table Count, Name

Add up the photo types (.HEIC, .JPG, .PNG, .DNG) and the video types (.MOV, .MP4) separately.

Explaining the difference

• Live Photos are two files. Each one is a .HEIC (or .JPG) plus a short .MOV. So the PC's video count will be higher than the phone's by roughly the number of Live Photos.
• Edited photos can be two files. An edited photo may copy as the original (IMG_1234) and the edit (IMG_E1234). Only one shows on the phone.
• Bursts. The phone counts a burst as one photo but stores every frame, so bursts raise the PC count.
• Screenshots and saved images are photos to the phone and copy like any other.

After those adjustments, the PC's photo count should be equal to or higher than the phone's, never lower. If it is lower, something was skipped: go back to causes 2, 3 and 5. If a specific month looks thin, open that month on the phone, note the count, and find the matching DCIM folder on the PC (the folder numbers roughly follow time).

Keep the numbers. The next time you import, you only need to check that the new total grew by the right amount.

7. A note on Windows' own tools

• File Explorer is the camera-protocol path described above, with all five causes in play.
• The Photos app's Import uses the same path for the phone itself, and its "from iPhone" suggestions lean on iCloud for Windows or OneDrive, which means uploading your library to a cloud to get it onto your own PC.
• Apple Devices for Windows (the iTunes replacement) handles backups and syncing but is not a photo importer; its main gift is the driver and the device service that other tools can use.
• iCloud for Windows downloads from iCloud rather than from the phone, so it needs your whole library in iCloud and enough iCloud storage to hold it.

8. How Sorta handles this

We built Sorta because of this problem, so here is what it does differently, without overselling it.

• When the Apple Devices app or iTunes is installed, Sorta reads the phone through Apple's own USB device service, the way Apple's software does, rather than the camera protocol. It walks every file and reads the phone's own photo database, so it knows the real total before it starts.
• When that service isn't available it uses the Windows driver, but it does not take one look. It walks the folders again after 30 seconds, 2 minutes and 5 minutes while the phone is idle, and it remembers across connections how many items each month folder has ever shown, so it can tell you plainly: "showing 119 of 208 months."
• It checks every copy against the phone and retries the ones that do not match, instead of stopping at the first error.
• It never writes to or deletes from the phone, and it imports only what is new on the next connection.
• It cannot reach originals that are in iCloud and not on the phone (cause 3). Nothing can. Before a large import, Sorta shows a short checklist for the phone (Keep Originals, Auto-Lock, Low Power Mode, unlocking and trusting the PC, the cable), which helps with causes 1, 4 and 5; cause 3 is yours to fix in iCloud settings first.

Sorta is free on your first 1,000 photos, with no time limit and no account, and the trial never caps counting: it shows your phone's full total even before you buy. Try it on your own phone and run the count-and-compare check on the result.

Written by the maker of Sorta, in the Houston area, Texas. Corrections welcome at feedback@sorta.photos.