How do I move my photo library from iPhone to Android, or the other way?

Photographs are usually the hardest part of a platform switch, and the part where damage is silent. The files themselves move easily. What breaks is the metadata — the capture date that keeps twenty years in order, the album structure, the pairing between a still and its short video, and the edits that were stored as instructions rather than baked into the file.

What you'll need

• Both accounts set up
• A computer (optional)
• An external drive (optional)

Step by step

1. Choose a route before you touch anything.Three exist. Service to service, where the providers transfer directly between accounts — cleanest where offered. Export and import, using an account-level export archive and then uploading it to the destination — most control, most time. Or a manual copy via computer, which is fine for files but loses the most structure.
2. Deal with the date problem explicitly.The capture date lives inside the file for most photographs, and outside it for some — particularly screenshots, edited copies and anything a messaging app has touched. Google's export includes a small metadata file next to each image carrying date and location; keep them and use an import that reads them, or a large part of your library will land dated as today.
3. Expect albums to survive unevenly.Service-to-service transfers usually carry albums. Archive exports carry them as folders. A manual copy carries nothing. If your albums matter, choose accordingly, and screenshot the album list before you start so you can tell what arrived.
4. Handle live photos and motion photos separately.Both platforms pair a still with a short clip, and they do it differently. Transfers commonly produce either a still only, or a still and a separate unlinked video file. Decide whether you care; if you do, check a few before committing.
5. Check for baked-in versus non-destructive edits.Crops, filters and adjustments are often stored as instructions applied on display, not written into the file. Move the library and you may get the untouched original. Export your genuinely important edited images separately as finished files.
6. Move in batches if the library is large.Year by year, or a few thousand at a time. A single enormous transfer that fails at eighty per cent tells you nothing about what arrived. Batches let you verify as you go.
7. Verify before deleting the source.Count, oldest, newest, a sample from each year opened at full size, a video played, and the album list compared. Then leave the source account alone for at least a month.

Common mistakes

• Sending photographs to yourself through a messaging app — Messaging apps compress heavily by default and strip metadata. It is the fastest way to turn a library into small, undated copies.
• Deleting the old account as soon as the transfer reports success — Success means files arrived, not that dates, albums and videos survived. Verify first, and leave the source in place for weeks.
• Discarding the small metadata files in an export archive — They look like clutter and they carry the capture dates. Deleting them is what causes a whole library to arrive dated as the day it was imported.

Questions people ask