I have enabled iCloud Photo Library and selected "Optimize iPhone Storage" on my iPhone. There are 20000+ photos and videos in the "All Photos" album on my iPhone, but since the storage of my iPhone is only 16GB so most of the photos and videos on my iPhone are not full-resolution copies. Now when I connect my iPhone to my Mac and try to import all the photos and videos to a blank library in the Photos app, it says there are only 200+ photos available for importing. Is there a way I can import all the photos and videos on my iPhone to my Mac?
Note that I don't want to turn on iCloud Photo Library on my Mac Photos app, because at some point I will reach the storage limit of iCloud Photo Library and I will have to start deleting photos from it, and I don't want to lose the local copies of them on my Mac.
My situation
- My iPhone has only 16GB of storage and it fills up quickly because I take tons of photos and videos. I don't want to import them every week, and I also want to look at photos or videos from one or two years ago, so I purchased 200GB of iCloud storage and enabled "Optimize iPhone Storage". This works great.
- I want to incrementally back up the photos and videos to an external hard drive which hosts my Photos library.