USB File Transfer

[Rebecca Baxter]

Hello. So I'm looking for additional ideas. I'm trying to transfer a large number of photos from my phone to my computer via USB cable. When I connect the phone to the computer I can't get the phone to show up in file explorer. I have tried every idea I can find online. I've tried different USB cables and different computers; it is the same everywhere, every time. When I pull down the status bar on my phone there is no options for charging or file transfer. I searched through every setting function on the phone and can't find anything labeled charging or transfer. I've adjusted and tried different settings on my computer as well. I've updated drivers, restarted both computer and phone - all to no success. I'm running Windows 11 on the computer with a Moto G Stylus with Android Version 11. The only thing that has worked so far is linking my phone to my computer so I can operate the phone through the computer, but this would require transferring the almost 400 photos one at a time by hand and I'm not keen on doing that. Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[ocnbrze]

just sign in to google photos on your phone and make sure that it is syncing. once that is all done, you can hop over to your pc and sign in to google photos on your web browser and BAM!!!!!!!! your photos on your phone are now on your computer.....granted only on the cloud at this point. you can just then download the photos onto your pc from google photos.

 

[Dannydet]

I also agree with ocnbrze...
Google photos is a life saver

 

[Hadron]

Though if you have a large number of photos you want to transfer then you may have to pay Google for sufficient storage (especially if you want to maintain the highest quality). And not everyone wants to give Google a copy of their entire photo library. So I understand preferring to do your own backups.

One thing you could try: enable the "developer options" menu, look in there for a "default usb configuration" setting and set it to file transfer. That would deal with any problem of the option not showing up in notifications. Don't mess with anything else you find in there unless you know what you are doing!

To enable developer options you need to find the "About" or "About phone" section in the system Settings, choose "software information", find the "build number" and tap that repeatedly until it tells you that you are now a developer (or maybe that developer mode is enabled - they change these things occasionally). Google seem to think this is cute...

If that doesn't work then there's always the 2 stage approach: connect a usb flash drive to the phone, use a file explorer app to copy your images to that, eject it and plug it into your computer. If your computer has a USB-C socket you can use a USB-C drive. If not then you need a USB A to C connector (also known as a USB OTG adapter, but make sure it's USB C rather than microUSB) so that you can plug a USB-A drive into the phone.