iCloud backups of phone?

[jp1]

Does anyone do this? I have an iPhone 6. In the past I've used dropbox to backup photos. Setup was easy. It's always worked flawlessly. Anytime I'm on wifi it uploads new photos to their server and anytime my pc is on at home it downloads those photos to a folder on my desktop.

However, for the past year I've been editing photos before texting or emailing them to people. Because iOS doesn't actually edit the photo but instead just creates a seperate file with the edited settings, dropbox only uploads the unedited version. Now I have hundreds of edited photos sitting on my phone that I'd like to move to my computer. From what I can tell my choices are to either mail them one by one to myself or use iCloud to backup my phone.

So that's what I spent two hours trying to do yesterday. Somehow for all my efforts I have precisely two photos that have backed up to iCloud and downloaded to my computer. When I click backup on my phone it does it's thing and then thinks it's done. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? (or more accurately, any idea what stupid completely non-intuitive monkey wrench did Apple throw into this particular process like they do with all their software?)

[Alan]

If you're just trying to move the photos from your phone to your computer, try a direct cable connection to your PC or Mac. Plug your lightning cable into the phone and the USB side to your computer and your computer will recognize it as a connected device. Navigate to your photos folder and copy. That's how I do it.

[jp1]

That works for unedited photos, and even for the file that contains the edits, but not for the ‘rendered’ version of the photo.

[Tradd]

I use the Camera Roll function or whatever they call it that syncs photos between iPhone and MacBook using iCloud. I also backup all photos to Google Photos. I have the uploader on MacBook so they are automatically backed up. Whatever I take with my phone also gets auto uploaded to Google Photos. I believe in multiple backups.

[SteveinMN]

jp1, is your computer Windows or macOS?

I never edit photos on my iPhone so I'm not familiar with how it copies the original image and the modified image/sidecar. iCloud should manage both, but then it depends on how you're accessing the photos on your computer: Apple's Photos app or some other image-manipulation program or just copying image files from iCloud to your local hard disk.

Another option is an app that lets you browse your iPhones files to move them back and forth en masse or to actually synchronize them. There are several of them in the App Store. If, for some reason, you don't want to use iCloud, one of these might be useful to you.

[jp1]

Actually, Alan inadvertantly solved my problem! I have a windows PC. Before iOS 11 there was no way to get the edited photos onto the PC other than emailing the edited version to myself or supposedly by getting them through iCloud, which is what I tried unsuccessfully last night.

But just now I plugged my phone into the computer for the first time since upgrading to iOS 11. Apparently iOS 11 stores photos in a different format, HEIF. As a result when I plugged my phone in dropbox automatically popped up with my camera uploads window showing both the unedited photo and then next to it the edited photo with the same name plus '-1' at the end of the name for all my recent photos. Photos taken before I upgraded to iOS 11 are only the edited versions which is fine since those are the ones I want anyway. I just copied my vacation photos from last summer from dropbox to the local computer folder and it asked if i wanted to replace the 156 with the same names.

Now I can cancel my iCloud extra storage subscription and chalk the $.99 I spent yesterday as a "learning" expense.