Typically, if you plug your iPhone into the Mac, Photos will self-launch and let you know which ones have already been imported (if any), as seen in the top row of the image below. The ones under the heading "new photos" are ones that have not yet been imported into Photos. If you don't see a "Already Imported" row at the top, this means that none of the photos on your iPhone have been imported yet. Likewise, if you don't see a "New Photos" row below it, that means all the photos on the iPhone have already been imported (or synced via iCloud Photo Library).
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Hi everyone: Need some clarification about photos app-iphone photos and iCloud. I plugged in the iphone to the mac photos to download pics, it's been awhile, came up with recently downloaded and the new items groups. The new items group was over 200 but when I looked at them I noticed that most of them w
ere already in photos. Why would they be imported again and does that mean that they will be in twice? Will they import as todays date or the date taken? With the icloud thing, the phone goes to iCloud but I don't have the photos on the mac going there as there are 20,000 plus pics on this machine. Also the mac is where I store them so if it was on iCloud then when I delete from the phone it would delete from the mac as well? Omg the more I tried to think about it the more confused I got. I really don't want to chase down 200 duplicates lol. Thanks Donna
Hi Donna;
I have an iPod and this recently happened to me. I had taken a bunch of new photos with it when I didn't have my camera along; I don't usually ever use the iPod for photos but this was an unusual chance to get photos of something interesting and I was without my usual camera. So I plugged the iPod into my laptop and had the same results as you. I was a bit bewildered, as I was sure I had already downloaded all except the last days' photos. However all the images showed as "New Items". Being impatient to get those latest images onto the computer, and unsure exactly was going on at that moment, I just clicked the "Import all New Items" highlighted button to be on the safe side, and everything was downloaded into Photos, as in your case. What you
should do when this happens is to select the new ones (by clicking the first in the series to highlight it, then hold down the 'Shift' button and click the last image and all should be highlighted). Then you have the option to click "Import Selected" as that button should become highlighted and active.
The older, previously imported images all reside before the beginning of this year in my Photos 2020, and are identified by the date they were taken, eg. April 5, 2018; Oct 31, 2019. If you have multiple years of images in the one Photos library then you will have to search for them scattered among the other ones you may have, but they will be in order of the date taken regardless of when they were imported.
Why they all came up as "New" in my case was that every year I make a new photos library (otherwise they get too ginormous!); and the older images had indeed been imported, but into the previous 2 years' Photos libraries. When the current 2020 library is the selected library, the computer recognizes anything with a different date (eg. 2018; 2019; a 2020 image that hasn't been imported yet) as 'new'. It can only recognize the images in the currently selected library; so anything else is 'new'. So now I know what happened I have to delete those duplicates from the current 2020 library. Could this be what happened in your case? - you said its been a while...as it had been for me.
I don't deal with iCloud; thinking about how much confusion I could create for myself if I get involved with it makes my head hurt! ;-) Perhaps yours showed as all new because they were to the computer, if you had previously imported them to iCloud and not the computer; or if you set up a new Photos library every year and they had been imported to a previous years library like mine... I think if your computer were also connected to iCloud it would also have all those images in its Photos library, and could have recognized them if they were in the currently active library (If I understand how it works, which is questionable!). I hope this helps! Sharon