There are two main things I want to copy, pictures in the photo library and .mp3 files saved by the (third party) Voice Recorder application. Here is what I've tried:
When I attach the phone to a PC, I get a DCIM folder with a bunch of subfolders, but nothing giving a clue to how the images are organized in albums, or even ordered by date. Further, I know there are complicated options about what is kept on the device and what is in iCloud. What I really want is a way to copy all of the pictures, whether on the phone or iCloud, to the PC. Does Apple try to make this difficult to lock you in to iCloud?
For the Voice Recorder .mp3 files, I can copy files from the application to the Files application in bulk, so that's good, but I don't know how to get them from Files to the PC in bulk. I tried various things but I only seem to be able to copy them one at a time. I tried using iZip but it failed, perhaps because the files are too large? The thing that seemed most promising was to add my Google Drive account as a "Location" in the Files app, and then drag all the recordings from the "On this iPad" location to the Google Drive location. But I waited hours and hours and it only seemed to copy one of the files out of the ~100 that were selected and dragged.
I found https://snapdrop.net/, which is cool, however again it only seems to let me copy one file at a time, which is not feasible. Again, I was thinking maybe I could zip the files, but iZip fails.
I don't mind paying a reasonable amount for a backup/copy app, if that's what it takes, but I wasn't able to tell from the descriptions of the apps I looked at that they would do what I need.
Note: I also did a full backup from the iPhone to my PC via iTunes. Unfortunately that creates a set of cryptically named files and folders. I'm assuming it's a proprietary format and there's no simple way to turn those into a regular directory of files?
Note: I was hoping to copy to a PC, but if copying to a MacBook is easier, that works also.
